New Telegram update | Topics in Groups, Collectible Usernames, and Voice-to-Text for Video

Telegram for Android and iOS has been updated to version 9.1 (other Telegram clients will receive the new version soon). Now let's talk about the most interesting features.

Topics in Groups

• To make it easier to follow the flow of information in conversations, admins of groups of 200 or more members can now organize discussions by topic.
• The feature allows you to create separate chats within the main group for certain discussions.
• For each topic, you can separately set up new message notifications and quickly view the media files that were published in it.
• Participants of such "sub-chats" have access to the entire arsenal of familiar tools, including polls, pinned messages and bots.
• Administrators can enable topics in Group Settings and choose who can create topics in the Permissions section.

Collectible Usernames

• Now you can bind several collectible public names to accounts and chats — in addition to the regular one.
• Users can purchase or sell a valuable account or chat link on the new Fragment platform.
• Collectible public names look and work exactly like regular @usernames.
• • Unlike standard usernames, collection names can be shorter than 5 characters.
• Once a collectible public name is purchased, users can dispose of it as they wish — for example, sell it or save it for later use.
• Any of the purchased public names can be deactivated. In this case, it will not be visible in the search results, but it will still remain with the owner.

Voice-to-Text for Video Messages

• Now Premium-users have the opportunity to instantly translate speech from video messages into text format.
• Previously, users could only decrypt audio messages — now the option also works with "circles".

New emojis

• For this update, Telegram artists have prepared 12 new official emoji sets available with a Premium subscription.
• 4 new interactive emojis: 😴, 👨‍💻, 🤓, 👀.
• They are accompanied by full-screen animation in private chats, and can also be used as reactions to messages.
• In honor of Halloween, 3 thematic reactions are available to all users in any chats: 👻, 🎃, 😭.

Visual changes

• Updated night mode (iOS): more balanced combinations of shades and improved blur effect in translucent elements.
• Customize Text Size (Android): changing the text size in the Chat Settings menu now applies to all chat items, including link previews, service messages, and more.
• New animations when moving between screens in the Android application and swiping left to reply to a message.
• Clicking on a phone number in a user's profile now opens a new menu to select the type of call.
• In place of messages during the loading of the chat, the outlines of text blocks appear with a new pulsating animation.

Read more about all the new features in the Telegram blog.