How to hear voice messages on WhatsApp without the sender knowing
Similar to other chat apps, WhatsApp uses a system of reading indicators in conversations that inform the sender that their message has been sent, delivered, or read by the other party. Sometimes this system is a blessing and sometimes a curse! If you are the sender of the message, whether text or voice, you will find it a useful feature to make sure that your message has been read or heard, but if you are the recipient, you may not want the sender to know that his message has reached you successfully because he will expect you to reply to him and therefore you are kind of forced to respond to avoid embarrassment. Fortunately, there are several ways that we review below to trick this system so that WhatsApp voice messages can easily be heard without the sender knowing about it if you are someone who likes to wait a bit before responding.
Method 1: Disable the message read indicators
WhatsApp settings already allow you to disable reading indicators in individual conversations so that most of the activities you do when you use the application are hidden from your contacts, including hearing voice messages. “Message Read Indicators” is the name of the setting responsible for showing or hiding blue ticks in conversations that confirm to the other party that you have read or heard messages; So to make sure the sender doesn't know that you're listening to the audio messages they send you should disable this setting, even if temporarily.
Note that disabling Message Read Indicators means that you will also lose the ability to know if your voice messages have been heard in conversations as you don't see blue ticks. If you don't mind, this is probably the best method for you. All you have to do is open the WhatsApp application and then go to the “Settings” section from the bottom bar [on iPhone] or click on the menu button (⁝) and choose “Settings” [on Android] then go to “Account” and then click on “Privacy” Privacy and turn off the message read indicators. As we mentioned, you can consider temporarily disabling the message reading indicators, meaning disabling them before hearing the voice message and then reactivating it after responding to the sender.
Method 2: Activate Airplane Mode
Another effective way to hear voice messages in WhatsApp without the sender's knowledge is to disconnect the Internet from your phone before opening the conversation; This way, you'll prevent the app itself from knowing that you've seen and opened the message, so the sender won't know either. And certain, ly the easiest way to disconnect the Internet from the phone is to activate “Airplane Mode” when you want to read messages secretly, whether from the notification screen in Android phones or the control center or settings in the iPhone.
Once you do, open the WhatsApp app and tap on the conversation, and start playing the voice messages as you wish. When you are done, exit the application and close it completely, i.e. remove WhatsApp from the list of recently opened applications. With this, you can disable Airplane mode, and the messages will remain unread until you open the WhatsApp application.
Method 3: Extract the voice message file [Android only]
The Android version of the WhatsApp application has special and unique capabilities, that is, it is not available in the application version on other platforms such as iOS. Among these capabilities is “automatic download of all kinds of media” meaning that the app saves photos, videos, documents, and also audio clips to the phone memory as soon as it is received from any sender via the app. In this way, we can take advantage of this feature to hear the sent voice messages without even opening the conversation inside the WhatsApp application, all that is required is to extract the voice message file.
First of all, you need to make sure that the automatic download of audio clips is enabled within the WhatsApp application. So, open the application and press the menu button ( ⁝ ) and choose “Settings”, then go to the “Storage and data” section, and under the “media auto-download” section, you will find 3 options “While Using Mobile Data” and “On Connection” On Wi-Fi” and “While Roaming” all you have to do now is open each option and add a [✔] sign next to “Audios” and then save the settings to it.
From now on, whenever you receive a new audio message on WhatsApp, it will be saved to the internal memory of your Android phone. If you want to hear this message without the sender knowing, all you need is to access the folder containing the audio message files through the File Manager application. All Android phones usually come with a file manager app pre-installed which works, but for the purpose of this tutorial, we relied on the Google Files app.
After opening the File Manager application, go to the folder where WhatsApp saves the received voice messages. This folder can be found after clicking on "Internal storage" and then searching for the "WhatsApp" folder after opening it, click on the "Media" folder and there you will find a folder called "WhatsApp Voice Notes". Once we are in that folder, scroll down to the last folder in the list that contains the last audio messages received that day, a folder is created for each day as you notice.
You will notice that all voice messages are saved as Opus files, which is a format that Android does not play by default, so select the file and press the menu button ( ⁝ ) to choose "Rename" then a popup will appear where you delete the file format [opus.] Replace it with [.mp3], then press OK and confirm that you want to convert the file format.
Once the file is converted to MP3 format, you will be able to play it through the file management application and hear the content of the voice message without opening it from within the WhatsApp application, which means that the sender will have no idea whether you opened the conversation or listened to the message.
