Video: Telstra has a new app that brings together all the messaging and voicemail features that you rely on your mobile carrier for. It’s a lot of duplication if you’re already committed to a third-party service like Facebook Messenger, but it also converts your voicemails to text and lets you listen to them individually.
Built on RCS — rich communication services, which is basically the SMS standard on steroids — the new Telstra Messaging app will be rolled out to its customers using Samsung’s Galaxy S7, S7 Edge and S8+ handsets, with other unnamed Android handsets to be supported “in the coming months”. It has group chat with other Telstra Messaging users, file sharing and other read receipts.
What’s most interesting about Telstra Messaging is that it brings visual voicemail to Android, dropping them into the app as individual audio files — transcribed as text messages, to boot — for you to listen to at your leisure. All of this would be more than a bit redundant if you — like most of anyone who would read Gizmodo — already used an over-the-top messaging service like Facebook Messenger. But Telstra Messaging isn’t for us, not really — it’s for everyone else. [Telstra]