Group Chats with Social Pressure... KakaoTalk Adds 'Quiet Exit' Feature

It will become possible to quietly leave KakaoTalk group chat rooms.

On the 10th, Kakao conducted a KakaoTalk update (v10.2.0) and added the ‘Quietly Leave Chat Room’ feature to the Labs.

Users who update to the latest version can select the ‘Quietly Leave Chat Room’ option in KakaoTalk Labs. After selecting this option and leaving a group chat room, the message ‘OOO has left’ will not be displayed to other participants. This is expected to reduce the stress of users who have been inconvenienced by unnecessary messages and notifications in group chat rooms where conversations have become sparse or they missed the timing to leave.

This ‘Quietly Leave Chat Room’ feature was developed as part of Kakao’s ‘KakaoTalk Easy’ project, which will be carried out throughout 2023. ‘KakaoTalk Easy’ is a project focused on reducing users’ conversation stress and burden, and improving convenience in daily life. Its goal is to add new features to KakaoTalk and improve existing ones so that anyone can use KakaoTalk safely and without barriers.

Starting with this update, Kakao plans to continuously add features to reduce user stress within this year. These will include functions such as easily turning off notifications or setting notification methods according to the user’s situation.

Hong Eun-taek, CEO of Kakao, stated, “KakaoTalk has grown with the love of many citizens, with the number of messages sent over the past 10 years reaching 7.6 trillion. However, as the volume of conversations, the purposes of communication, and the diversity of relationships in conversations have explosively increased, user inconvenience and burden also seem to be growing.” He added, “We will continue to listen to user feedback and reflect various improvements to enhance user satisfaction and convenience.”

Meanwhile, Kakao continues to introduce various improvement measures reflecting user opinions under the goal of ‘making communication closer and safer between people and between people and technology.’

Notable updates include the ‘Accept/Reject Unknown Friend Chat Room Invitation’ feature that confirms acceptance when a user not on the friend list is invited to a group chat room, improved usability of ‘Scheduled Messages’ by removing the scheduled message display, and the ‘Talk Siren’ feature for user safety. Additionally, through the ‘KakaoTalk Manual’ page opened last April, various KakaoTalk features and how to set them are introduced.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.