WhatsApp for Windows 11 gets 3 super-cool new features in its latest update
Windows 10 users will benefit from this hefty update, too
A new update to WhatsApp for Windows 11 and Windows 10 adds three new features that boost user experience in a big way: multi-window support, a new ‘hamburger’ menu, and a new interface. These are also hints of the addition of Meta AI features here (and we’ll come back to that later).
Spotted by Windows Latest, the update has added a little bit of life to the WhatsApp interface on Windows, which was pretty boring and drab beforehand. You had to struggle when resizing to get your contacts and message threads to show at the same time and often had to choose between the two. However, now you can hide the contact list within the menu, so your chat takes up the full-screen space, and you can easily bring your contacts list back up by clicking through the menu.
Secondly, you can now open a chat in a new window if you want to isolate just one conversation. You’ll also be able to open multiple chats if you don’t want to have the whole app open, and want to keep up with just a few important people. The chat window will open up with a more stripped-down layout, keeping it simple.
Finally, a new hamburger menu (a cute way to refer to drop-down menus that are shown as three lines stacked on top of each other) separates the app into chats, calls, and status updates. So overall, the update adds useful new features and streamlines the app into a more digestible format.
Windows Latest suggests that the simple hamburger menu may make space for a range of Meta AI features to come to WhatsApp, as announced earlier this year. This could include using the search bar to input queries to Meta AI without making a separate chat. The integration of AI assistants into WhatsApp sounds similar to the ones introduced to Instagram last year, which included famous personas like Snoop Dogg!
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Muskaan is TechRadar’s UK-based Computing writer. She has always been a passionate writer and has had her creative work published in several literary journals and magazines. Her debut into the writing world was a poem published in The Times of Zambia, on the subject of sunflowers and the insignificance of human existence in comparison. Growing up in Zambia, Muskaan was fascinated with technology, especially computers, and she's joined TechRadar to write about the latest GPUs, laptops and recently anything AI related. If you've got questions, moral concerns or just an interest in anything ChatGPT or general AI, you're in the right place. Muskaan also somehow managed to install a game on her work MacBook's Touch Bar, without the IT department finding out (yet).