The Apple Watch is a feature-rich smartwatch and while most of its features are essentials, such as notifications, calling, ECG and more, there are some features that aren’t essential, but are definitely amazing to have. Walkie-talkie is one of these features that I’ve started to love using on my Apple Watch Series 5 all the time. However, setting it up isn’t the most straight-forward thing and people have a bunch of doubts about it, so today I’m going to help you set-up and use walkie-talkie on your Apple Watch.
First up, let’s take a quick look at what this feature is and why you might like to use it. As the name suggests, the feature behaves like a walkie-talkie, except instead of connecting peer-to-peer, it goes over the internet. This means that while regular walkie-talkies have short ranges of communication, this feature can work across the world as long as both you and the receiver are connected to the internet.
Launch the Walkie-Talkie app on your Apple Watch.
Now, tap on ‘Add Friends’ and invite the person you wish to talk with. You only need to invite a contact once. After that, assuming they accept the invitation, you can contact them anytime.
If someone has invited you to connect with them on Walkie-Talkie, you will first need to accept their invite. You can do that by launching the Walkie-Talkie app, and tapping ‘Accept’ on the invite as shown below.
Once you’ve set up Walkie-Talkie and invited your contacts, anyone can reach you on Walkie-Talkie at any time. While in some situations this is useful, it’s not so great if you’re say, at work, and suddenly a voice starts coming from your watch. So it’s better to disable Walkie-Talkie when you don’t wish to be disturbed.
To enable or disable walkie talkie, just open the control center and tap on the Walkie Talkie icon. The icon turns yellow when Walkie-Talkie is on, and grey when the feature is off.
