Telegram app update adds voice calling features for Western Europe

Telegram, one of the most popular mobile messaging apps, is beginning to add a much requested feature. The app is now rolling out its Voice Call features for users in Western Europe, with the promise that it will be added in other parts of the world in the near future.

As with its text chats, Voice Call in Telegram is supposed to offer end-to-end safe and encrypted audio chats. It uses the Diffie-Hellman key exchange to ensure that calls cannot be intercepted. In fact, it actually uses emoji to let users know their Telegram call is safe. An example of this is shown below. Basically, if you and the person you are talking to see the same four emoji, your chat should be encrypted.

Voice Calls in Telegram will use a peer-to-peer connection for the most part, but for some reason one cannot be made, the app will instead use the closest server to you to connect your call. The company also claims that the app will use a neural network and machine learning so that future calls will have improvements in audio quality. The app also adds a way to control who can and cannot call you on Telegram.

The new 3.18 version of Telegram has another feature in its update unrelated to Voice Call. It now allows you to select the degree of compression in a video you want to send to someone else before it is released to that person.