Slashdot Mirror
Time For Voice-Mail To Throw In the Towel
theodp writes "Slate's Farhad Manjoo feels the end of voice-mail is nigh, and it won't be missed. Since March, he's been using Google Voice to transcribe his voice-mail messages into text that he gets as skimmable e-mail. No more listening to at least a bit of each voice-mail message, hearing the same instructional prompts between each, and worrying about whether it's 9-to-archive and 7-to-skip (or vice versa). Goodbye and good riddance, says Manjoo, to an 'absurdly backward mode of human-computer interaction' that he half-jokes must violate the Geneva Conventions."
it costs me to listen to it, and if it's important enough, they'll call again or leave a text or something
Visual voicemail.
The concept of voicemail is sound; the technology has been poor. Visual voicemail fixes the technology.
Text to speech isn't anywhere near 100% yet. Until it is, voicemail isn't going anywhere. Beyond which, human voice can impart additional meaning in tone that text can't. We probably could make better voicemail systems, but I don't see a lot of effort going into that. It isn't really a revenue generator for anyone, and the existing systems aren't that bad to use. 1 button to delete, 1 to save, 1 to repeat. I'd like to see fast forward and rewind like old tape based answering machines had, but that's about all it needs.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
..if you live in America. I'm pretty sure Google Voice isn't available elsewhere.
this is pretty cool and very useful.
The author is entitled to his opinion but vmail is IMHO the best way to leave messages and if the person you are leaving vmail for is professional you will get an answer back fairly quickly. You only start to have problems when the person you are leaving the vmail for or getting email from does not quite naturally speak the same language as you or has a strong accent that is difficult for the parties to understand.
Vmail is just one of many communication methodologies, each one has advantages and disadvantages and choosing one or more that work well with the way you do business is very much a personal experience. What communication methods work well with one may not work well with others.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
My other half uses a transcription service, SpinVox for her mobile phone which takes the messages and sends them via text message and email. Unfortunately I have a rather non-standard accent, what with the elocution lessons my parents made me take during my childhood in Northern Ireland, spending half my life in England and my default ability to try to match the speaking patterns of who I am talking to. It consistently mangles it's transcription of my messages.
A more interesting (for me anyway) approach for me is that taken by Microsoft's unified communications stuff where I've seen your phone number route through to your computer to Office communicator, with voicemails being emailed as attachments. Of course this is very corporate centric, but it strikes me as more useful. Sure you have to listen to the attachment, but there's no risk of misunderstanding because a transcribing service got it horribly wrong.
... will be a text-to-voice service that will read your Google Voice mail to you...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
To answer my own rhetorical question he has, he spends a paragraph musing over Visual Voicemail. I don't quite understand what his problem with it is, the iPhone lets you not listen to messages as easily as it lets you listen to them. It also makes sure messages are associated with contacts in your address book so its obvious who the voicemail is from. He could just used the "missing calls" screen or listen to the voicemails or just throw his phone in a lake because he doesn't seem to be a good conversationalist anyways.
The main complaint of the article isn't a technical one, both Visual Voicemail and Google Voice solve the technical problems with voicemail. His real problem is a social one. His friends are assholes and leave messages consisting of "call me back" knowing they're calling his cell phone and more to the point probably know he has an iPhone or doesn't like checking his voicemail. He's not using the iPhone's ability to ignore useless voicemails and his friends don't seem to register the fact he has caller ID and will be able to see he missed their call.
This is a vexing situation because these people have probably had cell phones for the past ten years if not longer. They know everyone has caller ID and their phones alert them to missed calls. There's no need to waste the time on "call me back" voicemails for anyone. At the same time voicemail is not without its uses. Voicemail can be left by anyone with a phone including landlines. Your SO can leave a message from their landline work phone saying they'll be late for dinner or your kid's school can tell you to come pick them up because they're sick. Voice also tends to be a bit more information dense than printed words since it can convey emotion as well as information.
Oh well, we should all ditch voicemail because a Slate writer has dumbass friends.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Orange, TMobile and O2 milk far too much cash by diverting to voicemail after as few rings as reasonable.
This message was scanned by European governments and contains no terrorism.
Didn't Apple's iPhone raise the bar by allowing the user to pick and choose which voice-mails to listen to? I think that was a major improvement to voice-mail, saving the user time by eliminating the instructional prompts and displaying who left messages instead of having to listen sequentially to each one. If only I had AT&T and an iPhone... Whatever happens down the road, I know I won't miss voice-mail. It can be a hassle. Especially when someone calls just to say "Call me back." Thanks..
Does he have a totally different voice mail to me?
"Beyond which, human voice can impart additional meaning in tone that text can't."
:-D lulz ROFLcopter )-': to impart those more nuanced details.
Bah! I fully expect my transcribed voice mail to include
Quack, quack.
I disagree. Voice mail will not go away. It will eventually converge with email.
Sometimes I want to hear someone speak to understand tone, sometimes I want to read to save time. I think voice and email will converge. Just because he's getting speech to text doesn't mean he'll want to destroy the speech data. What if you don't know someone is being sarcastic, or if you just happen to miss the sound of someone's voice?
Alternatively, I think a simple text to speech feature will eventually come about too. Though theoretically not quite as useful for gauging emotion (though I'm sure some "emotional emphasis" could probably be added without too much difficulty), some people may prefer to hear a text message when they're doing things like driving.
It will certainly be refined and perfected over the next decade or so, but as the summary states, it's already starting to happen.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I'd be a lot more inclined to actually listen to that crap if I didn't have to dial through 4 keypad activated menus before I got to the actual message. Put it on the phone so you can listen to it as quickly as you would an SMS, and make sure there's a time limit on there that makes sure they can only explain who they are and why they're calling. 15 Seconds sounds about right...
And stop wasting my time with automated voice crap - whether it be voice mail or service hotlines. If you're gonna charge me a Euro a minute, you'd better put an actual person on the other end of the line.
although there is a minority of people that like to have the latest technologies, most resist change. When it comes to the phone, it is particularely true. Video calls have been around for a long time now... how many people use them? The same with wap. voice converted to text is an interesting concept, but it will have the same problem for mainstream adoption.
1) Text conversion is approximate at best, especially if noise levels get high
2) it's as much how you say it that counts... irony, hesitation, sobbing, sorrow wont get translated and even if they are what is the message gonna be "Hello [laughter] I miss you [sob][sob][sob]"
3) multicultural societies will have even more messed up translations... I occasionally use 3 languages in a conversation (and I know others use more)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
I switched my voice mail off, so I don't need to check my messages, because "the leaving of a message is one half of a social contract which is completed by the checking of the message.
If that social contract breaks down then all social contracts break down. We decent into anarchy."
Voice-to-text is great if you speak English or another language spoken by at least 20 million people. If you're part of a minority, not so.
If this thing will kill voicemail, email would have killed phones already
Although I check my voicemail via emailed attachments, most of them are rather urgent, and mere text does not convey the whole story. There's no way anyone can convince me they leave the same message on voice mail as they do on a SMS text message.
Here's a real example of two messages I received two days ago:
[text] you gotta minute?
[voice] Man I'm in a jam, I've got an offer to jump in on a European tour, but we don't have the right demo, they want something raw, can we cut something in the club?
That is a personal favor and no way it gets approved via text. It would be ignored, and the sender would be PNG instead of on his way to Europe.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Voice Mail is easier than E-Mail.
With voice mail, you can:
1: Delete by quickly pressing 1 key,
2: Don't get as NEARLY as much SPAM mail,
3: You just need a cheap phone, and not a whole computer, internet access, ISP, etc.
Voice mail will never go away. Period. I wish these 'tech people' would quit making their bizarre predictions just to get their name in a magazine or article.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
the death of voice mail just as I welcomed the paperless office!
Wow, a Google Spam post, how we have progressed, Ever research Voice to Text software? I wear "Blew Genes".
Here is a concept, if your client wanted to leave you an email, they would have. They wanted to talk to you. They left a message instead of contacting your competition.
Tell you what, have them call me, I will be happy to take them as a client.
And in other news: TV will kill cinema and thanks to computers we don't need books anymore.
This "article" reads like someone who is either trying to promote the new service with a little extra publicity - or is trying to prove how techno-savvy he/she is by using a leading edge tech.
Well, yawn, I really don't care.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
WTF do i want to read when i can listen?
I'll try it. but I have serious doubts about this voice to text capability. People have been trying voice to computer features for over a decade now, with really lousy and impractical results.
Listening to drunken messages left on my voicemail is often the highlight of a Sunday morning hangover.
Visual Voicemail on the iPhone should have "fixed" the user-unfriendly nature of traditional voicemail. But alas, here in the UK, it is all-too-frequently unavailabe, either due to lack of a mobile signal (even though the messages are stored on your phone, Visual Voicemail is disabled if you lose signal), or due to unspecified faults that result in you being told smply that Visual Voicemail is unavailable and you must dial in to access your voicemail manually. A potentially great service, crippled by some horrible "service DRM" that shuts it off as soon as the service isn't there.
Like many iPhone users, I often evangelise about the iPhone and encourage my friends to get one. But I always include one caveat: DON'T get it based on the attraction of Visual Voicemail. The feature is so often unavailable that you should regard it as non-existant.
Vodafone just started the voice mail in India. I used it first time a few days back and said to myself "Hey.. this is great.. why didn't we have this earlier?"
And now this.
I have some services, such as Vonage, that attempt to provide a speech-to-text transcription of your voicemail to your email. However, being someone not originally born in the US, many of my voicemails tend to be in another language.
Staying in touch with my family is very important to me, and if I'm missing their voicemails, then I can't use these services. It will be a long time before a lot of the world's languages have speech-to-text conversion and an automatic service could recognize which language is being spoken and then use the appropriate conversion.
So I don't think voicemail will go away at all, perhaps become less common.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
It gives the caller the illusion (maybe it's my message) that the message is Very Important to me and will be returned (right, delete) ASAP!
And it was never popular in Europe.
In Serbia, our fixed line monopolist Telekom does not offer voice mail. On the other side, all of our mobile providers do offer voice mail, and they offer it for 8 years, and still no one uses it.
Somewhat similar to this, mobile providers send you a SMS with a list of missed calls (time + number) so if you have turned your mobile off, you'll get the list as soon as you turn your phone on.
Also if you cannot get someone on his mobile, you can send him a SMS, and it will be delivered once he gets reachable again.
No sig today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_messaging There I fixed it for you.
Voicemail via most phones does suck (iphone is an exception). Can't you check your voicemails at work via your email client? We have been doing it for years and once you give someone the UM client you better not ever take it away.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
...have been greatly exaggerated by this D-Bag Slate guy. As with many sub-par authors, he's chosen to assume that his personal situation and preferences must mirror societies situation and preferences as a whole. Sure, pal. I've got one word for you: pagers.
People have been decrying the death of pagers for nearly 15 years now, but you know what? I personally know ~20 professionals in the medical field who swear by theirs, and use them daily. A quick unscientific poll of 4 of those friends turned up estimates of between 30 and 50 additional people that they personally know who use pagers regularly.
Just like 'landline' telephones, pagers, Amiga computers, and... yes... Radio Shack answering machines, voice mail is not going to be going away anytime soon. Why? Because in some contexts, and/or for some people, voice mail works as well as they will ever need it to, so there is no need to upgrade to something else.
Personally, I predict we won't be seeing VM going completely away for a long time. Did I mention that I think the author of the original article is a giant D-bag. I did? Well now I've done it twice.
---As my daddy used to tell me: "You gotta be smart before you can be a smartass."
It keeps spammers away!
My home phone and cell phone both go directly to voice-mail for all non-white-listed calls (including all unrecognized/private numbers).
...just like email killed faxes.
Someone needs to invent a mobile phone that answers the call and captures the voicemail locally when switched on. Voicemail is great for making telephone companies money. If you can't get to your phone in 25 seconds you caller leaves and message then you call to listen to the message and then you call them back to speak to them. The telephone company just multiplied their revenue by three. When you ask for the telephone company to extend the ring time they tell you 25 seconds is the maximum other wise it causes the network issues.
although there is a minority of people that like to have the latest technologies, most resist change. When it comes to the phone, it is particularely true. Video calls have been around for a long time now... how many people use them?
There are some very good and perfectly valid *non-technical* reasons that people might not want video calling- and they're nothing to do with "resisting change".
For one thing, there's the issue of appearance. Someone calls you on the phone, you don't have to worry about how you look. On video- that's an issue. Perhaps you just got out of bed and look very rough. Perhaps you just aren't dressed in a manner you'd consider appropriate for the person you're speaking to. Even if you're in a "presentable" state, you might still have to make yourself ready.
Yes, you can turn the video off, but then it becomes an issue. Why do you have it turned off?
(Are you really late at the office or hanging about outside the pub? Yeah, maybe he *is*... and he doesn't want the girlfriend/wife to know that!)
Video also restricts what you can do while you're on the phone. Aside from the fact that people do many things- e.g. work, etc.- while speaking normally on the phone that would come across as both rude on video (because you're not paying attention to them) and impractical (if you have to be holding and/or looking at the camera, it restricts what you can do).
Video calling is one of those things people have thought would be cool for decades; why *wouldn't* you want to have it? Well, when it actually becomes possible and we're forced to consider the implications of using it in our day-to-day lives, there are actually plenty of reasons to prefer old-fashioned voice-only calls.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
*beeeeep* ...to page this user now, press pound, or leave a message after the tone" ...
*beeeeep*
*beeeeep*
"Hello, you have reached the voicemail of... BIKE HELMET
*biiiiip*
- "Hi honey! Hey, could you tell me what brand hemorrhoid cream you always get? You mentioned you were out and I'll be at the pharmacy later for my allergy medicine."
"You have... ONE ...new voice mail." ...you always get? You mentioned you were out and I'll be at the pharmacy... Trusted 0nline Pharmacy, ED pills save up to 80%. ViagraCialisLevita and more. CheapestPrice & 100% satisfaction guaranteed ...later for my allergy medicine... ALSO AT WALGREENS - ZYRTIC, 20 PROCENT OFF!."
- "Hi honey! Hey, could you tell me what brand hemmorhoid cream... NEED PREPARATION? NOW AT WALGREENS - ONLY $4.95!
"end of messages"
Yeah, not gonna happen, nobody would use it if that started happening. That said - trust Google not to store/parse your voicemail->text messages and use them to deliver targeted ads to you online / to your Account / etc.?
I'm a songwriter, and sometimes I call to sing to my answering machine when I have an idea and I'm away from home. I sure hope that google thingy can write music...
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
Unfortunately only my landline forwards to email - the mobile phone has a voicemail number, which is extremely expensive for a prepaid phone. I pay twice as much as the caller to listen to a message. That's why I haven't yet listened to my voicemail this year.
I wouldn't want to rely on voice transcription - especially of a recording that isn't dictated. I've managed to get a dictation tool to more or less transcribe my voice, but only if I speak far more slowly and clearly than I would on the phone.
Doesn't he regularly get asked to set so double the killer delete select all? ;)
"It's important!"
On the answering machine I may be able to guess the identity of from the voice. With a transcription I won't have a clue. And when is calling on a tinny cellphone that cuts out frequently from inside a boiler factory all I will get is "Lkjas! Fpie fgjh gpas! Important!". Especially when has a heavy Indian accent (which I would hsve recognized on the answering machine).
Now a system that would email me transcriptions with the original message attached would be interesting.
And no, I don't have caller ID.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Preface: I'm not an Apple worshipper. However, this fantasy seems ill-conceived. Voice is natural. Voice is good. Voice is why we still have and use phones when text and e-mail is freely available. It's not that voice mail is outmoded, it's just that the UI for its many various applications is. Here's where the Apple preface comes in - the Visual Voice Mail feature on my iPhone is *excellent*. I don't have to remember *any* commands. There's a track scrubber, a play/pause button, and a huge red DELETE button. I don't have to listen to them in order, I don't have to review/skip any messages to get to what I want, it "just works".
who amongst us parents hasn't kept a voice message from one of our children? These serve as a vocal snapshot in time that cannot be transcribed to a text message.
ya, it will be gone tomorrow. *yawn*.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Does anyone have links to working V2text software which will run on UNIX?
I'll believe that voice-mail will be gone some time shortly after I can walk around any sizable corporation without seeing fax machines everywhere.
Newsflash: Some people live and die by voicemail, and hardly ever use e-mail or texting. Just because it doesn't best fit the flow of your work doesn't mean it's not a killer app for others.
A friend of mine called and left me a voicemail the day before she died. :/
I'll treasure this recording for as long as I live and there's no way in hell a text message could ever replace it.
You can't take the sky from me.
A s far as I'm concerned, the best way to improve voicemail would be to adopt a standard interface like they did with cassette players years ago. This system of different commands for different systems is the pits, I can never remember which is which. Also, there should be a n easy way to totally customize your "audio interface"-everybody knows HOW to use voice mail, it needs to be much quicker to leave and retrieve messages. I don't need prompts telling me how to leave a message.
I've had Voice Mail activated for my mobile number from Airtel since 2000 in Delhi as well as Bangalore. Dunno about Vodafone, but I'm pretty sure Hutch (pre-Vodafone) had VM in their VAS offerings atleast since 2004. I've had many friends who had enabled it on their Hutch no:s.
Atleast 'try to' verify what you write.
Now, less than 0.1 percent of the huge Indian cellular subscriber base uses VM. Thats another point all together. But why bother to spend Rs. 3 per minute for an abstruse service when you can send an SMS for free (with most plans) or just leave a miss call (culturally de-facto method to ping the other cellular party in India). Business environment has different requirements. But in India so far I've very very rarely seen VM being used prominently. Email leads the way along with normal voice calls.
I'm sure a fair portion of people on /. have heard of google voice (not including me), but how many people in the general American population have used it. 1% maybe? If none of the techy people that I work with all day long have ever mentioned it to me, then I think it has a pretty poor market share, and find it even more unlikely that everyone would ditch voicemail in favor of it. Having heard of it, I have no desire to ditch voicemail in favor of it.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Proliferating Prompts. Prompts used to be minimal, with an "I know what I'm doing" mode for expert users. But recently, providers have injected more and more instructive prompts, slower prompt talking, have actively avoided using any sort of standard as to what keys mean, and have removed any method for avoiding these "first-time-user" type of prompts. (Try # on Sprint, though.)
The Novice User Paradigm. Voicemail systems have added in numerous new prompts and extras, just in case you, the user who has owned a cell phone for 7 years, have forgotten how to work the voicemail.
Old technology. It's hard to get any development done on an "old" technology. Human usability of voicemail could be made much more efficient, but because it is perceived as "yesterday's" technology, that is unlikely to materialize.
My guess is that marketing wants to "differentiate our product," and legal is afraid of someone "losing an important message because they couldn't use the system." The result is a system that succeeds on these goals, making it fail general usability. The result is, unfortunately, a pain in the ass to use.
VOICEMIAL DESIGNERS, PLEASE!
Why do I get the uncomfortable feeling that we are the frogs in the slowly warming pot of water?
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
We decent into anarchy.
...at least we will do it in a seemly, appropriate, tasteful and becoming fashion.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
By his own admission, Farhad's problem is that he hangs out with idiots who leave useless messages. He needs to educate the idiots and get his traffic down to what's useful.
Leaving a message involves some extra effort and time. If someone is willing to leave a message, it's important to them, so it's important to me.
Communication channels don't go away. Some technologies get modified: scrolls become books and telegraph becomes SMS, but the essence stays. Voice mail is here to stay because there will always be those of us who enjoy a rich medium that winky faces can't match.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I know of no young person who checks their own voicemail, ever. All they do is note who called and then call that person back, or not. I never leave a voicemail message for any young person any more. It's just a waste of my time. In fact the best thing, if it's not terribly urgent is you use Voice - SMS. Sprint has this feature where you can record and forward up to 2 mins of anything and then the receiver gets an SMS with a link to hear it. Otherwise leave a text SMS. But voicemail? No.
A Bosnian here.
I think that the dislike towards voice-mail in "these here parts" has something to do with the fact that we have never picked up on the whole "leave a message after the beep" thing - due to the rarity of answering machines in use.
Think about it... how many people you know actually have or have had one?
Father of a friend of mine does some to and from German translation from time to time.
So, his fax machine (BTW he is the only person I know that has one at home) has the greeting message recorded in 2 languages.
You could count the messages recorded from "locals" all these years using only the fingers on one of your hands. Germans on the other hand have regularly left voice messages when ever no one answered the phone.
Also, about 6 months ago, I got a new phone with a built in answering machine.
So far I had dozens of "missed calls" and not a single recorded message.
Somehow, people here are just not used to talking to a machine I guess.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
He's (at best) a mediocre tech writer given to sweeping pronouncements.
Let me preface - I hate voicemail and do wish it would go away. That having been said, there are plenty of industries where even though there may be a prevalence of computers, there are a lot of folks who either use them infrequently, or not at all. Think of a hospital (which is where I work) - Sure there are unit clerks who sit behind a desk all day on their PC, and some nurses do log in to PCs frequently to document patient care, but those nurses are not checking email in a patient room. Add to that the multitude of staff who's job doesn't require them to be in front of a PC: warehouse / materials-management, housekeepers, food services, etc. Getting information out to these employees is limited to either posting something in a break room, OR using voicemail distribution lists. These folks may not be in front of a PC, but management expects them to check their VM at least once a day. This benefits the organization in another big way - training & support costs. Eliminate the need to train a housekeeper on some voice-to-text or voice-to-email system, rely on the phone that 99.99% of people know how to use before getting a job, and you also eliminate support costs for additional PCs and the various other support costs. Supporting a PBX & VM system is a heckuva lot less costly than a comparable networked PC infrastructure.
Really. Cellphones now have enough memory for that. You shouldn't have to call back and use up airtime minutes/cost to get voicemail. It should be a user configurable setting. A priority setting would be nice as well, perhaps altering the ring, one ring means THIS IS TIME CRITICAL IMPORTANT, another is "answer when you get a chance" another could be "the voicemail is all you need, no reply necessary", along those lines.
I don't get this, this is a continual pattern with kdawson, seems to live in the border world of reality teetering on the fore front of technology but is some how blind to everything else.
Voicemail is used everywhere all around the world, just because a few people are using a better alternative doesn't mean that everyone else is.
I wish kdawson would stop these articles about "the end is nigh!" for different variants of technology just because an alternative is available. Articles with an undertone like this are absolute garbage and contribute nothing and simply show how out of touch kdawson is with the everyday reality of technology.
I agree, especially when Google Voice's text to speech only does English at the moment.
Actually I bet it only does American. I am English and all speech recognition I've encountered in the US has had real trouble understanding me presumably because I do not have an American accent.
The voicemail system of my previous phone provider was able to forward voicemails as audio attachments to an email. That avoids the speech-to-text problem, at the cost of making the email a lot larger (they used to send the audio as uncompressed WAV).
is that the guy who invented it died before I could kill him.
I agree that making a phone call to retrieve voicemails via an annoying press-this-for-that menu is obnoxious, especially from a cellphone (without a headset).
However, while googles transcribing options are interesting, they arent the only other option. I use an asterisk server, and all my voicemails are emailed to me as mp3, which I can access either the normal way from a desktop/laptop, or from my cellphone. No wading through menus, no worrying about deleting (They are all saved).
Does it also add emoticons to the text? I mean, transcribed voice mail is good, but nothing beats the live human voice for many reasons, emotions being one of them.
Both my company and my personal cell phone supports visual voicemail. I think this is more the trend. A hybrid of text and voice. At a glance you can quickly see who called, and at what time. It works just like an inbox. Just click on whatever message you want to hear.
Voice mail is not dead. It's just evolving.
More Slashdot hyperbole. Voicemail isn't going away anytime soon. Voicemail will go away about the same time Linux is widely adopted on the desktop. That is to say, not anytime soon.
I read alot on /. but I don't often post.
This concept has got to be one of the dumbest ideas to come along in a while on this site. The largest inconvenience I've seen on this topic is calls from family. Too.damn.bad. Best learn to cope.
End of voicemail, pfft! Convergence with email or text messages I can understand, but there is too much NOT conveyed in the written form that is essential to human communication. Text sucks because it doesn't convey tone. Phone communication sucks because it doesn't convey body-language. Or is the author still in his mom's basement, insulated from human interaction by his txt and email barriers? GET OUT AND USE MORE THAN ELECTRONIC TEXT TO COMMUNICATE, (caps for emphasis, not yelling).
And those who believe their systems/methods are best for everyone are the most myopic people with the narrowest mindsets imaginable. I'm fairly certain those same people have the least understanding why it was so hard to get mom to start using email. Man up, Nancy! That's your Mom! Take the GD call! (now I'm yelling)
That quaint, outmoded thing?
Let only those who have known what it is like to be unprotected by instruments like the Geneva Convention exercise the privilege of joking about it.
you had me at #!
Hell, I'm just happy that my VoIP provider (www.babytel.ca, www.babytelusa.com) forwards a voicemail to my email address.
No matter where I am, I can retrieve it pretty quickly without numeric prompts.
I started using SimulScribe (now PhoneTag) a few years ago. I get voicemail delivered to my email on my BB, along with a pretty good representation of what was said in the voicemail as text. The best feature is that any numbers rattled off by the caller are recognized as dialable digits by the phone, and I can just click to call.
Visual voicemail my ass.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
I didn't rtfa, and I don't really care about this yet another "Goodbye" to such and such a technology... Whatever. Just because ONE guy doesn't use it so goes the rest of the world? Is this Open source microsoft philosophy? Bill Gates only uses Vista so it's goodbye Windows 95 & Windows XP? Stop with declaring this or that technology dead. When it's really dead we won't need an announcement.
Real world example: The VCR is dead? Not. I got a buddy who is buying VHS tapes by the bulk for pennies a pound. He has a night job sitting around and now for a $30 investment (brand new VCR at Goodwill) and $10 he owns every twilight zone episode, dozens of first rate (albeit pre 2004) movies and an entire National Geographic special series.
We do like you early adopters but just because you go that way doesn't mean we'll be quick to follow. I'll continue to put up with the "horrible" inconvenience of voice mail for awhile longer.
Our family has an old and dear friend who's only flaw is the complete inability to leave a succinct voice mail message. Messages tend to be about 10 words of introduction (as if I didn't immediately know who it was), 40 words of apology for bothering me, 20 words of preamble, and then a 5 word question boiled down to about 30 words. (I know that doesn't make sense. You'd have to be there.) By the time we get to the actual issue, my mind has wandered and I have to start the message over.
This same person can raise the same issue in five words or less -- as a text message. (Bear with me here, this is on topic.) Yeah, I know, SMS is a stupid medium and it's criminal how much the phone companies are charging for what is essentially an already existing and unused part of their infrastructure. But, the constraints of the medium does serve to keep people on topic. I think it's a matter of expectation. We tend not to get offended by abrupt messages when they have to be tapped out on a keypad. It's amazing that we can communicate at all.
I haven't tried the speech-to-text services, but I guess it's the next thing to experiment with. I suspect it'll just present me with a huge block of free-form text instead of a stream-of-consciousness voice mail, and I'm not sure how that's an improvement, but at least I'll be able to skip to the bottom.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
iPhone Visual Voicemail: hear the actual message with no transcription errors, all of the inflections, and no loss of privacy.
Even age-old voice mail doesn't present the privacy problems of Google Voice.
Disclaimer: I work for a cellphone operator.
Ok, TFA has some valid points on the endless annoyance that we know as voicemail. But for mobile operators, at least, there's really no reason for them to kill this service.
And do you know why? Voicemail is considered, from a telco point of view, as a Call Completion Service. This allows the operator to generate revenue by forwarding a call that was destined for termination (B-party hung up, rejected etc) into a service that answers the call. At which point, they can charge the caller for this "previlege".
Let's say operator X has 100 million calls per month on its network where the called party has rejected the call or is unavailable. Assuming that:
* a chargeable block of 0.10 per minute
* everyone leaves a short message that's less than one minute long
The operator stands to make $10,000,000 a month in call completion revenue. By providing a simple voicemail service. Which no-one really cares about anyways. Of course, there'd be interconnect charges from other operators, but the gist is the same.
If voicemail was removed, the operator would lose this significant chunk of revenue, just because there was nothing to complete the calls. Which is why you'll never get existing operators who already provide voicemail removing it.
Voicemail == Call Completion == Cash Cow
Where I'm working, revenue from this call completion bit contributes around 20% of the monthly voice traffic revenue.
Another fun factoid: voicemail retrieval stands at 10% of those deposited.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
... unable to come to the point, loquacious to the point of absurdity, and ultimately telling you nothing at all?
The last time I had voice mail, I just let it fill up. I rarely speak to any of my clients now, unless we are directly troubleshooting things. It took a long time, but I've finally managed to weed out all the ones that could not express themselves in an email or IM.
Emotional content can be conveyed in text, if need be, but it really has no place in the work I do.
Every time I see articles like this, I wonder why people like this have cell phones in the first place if they hate using them so much. That, and they need to realize that the world doesn't revolve around them, and that people who need to contact them shouldn't have to bow to their whims to communicate with them (I'd love to hear the conversation with their boss about why they didn't respond to a critical voicemail). Look...if someone needs to relay some information quickly, a phone call is much quicker than e-mail or texting (yes, really - not everyone has a phone with a keyboard). Just answer your damn phone!
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Sure, we know checking voicemail is a pain in the ass, but leaving it is worse. I so much prefer text messages, especially for anything that's simple to ask or answer. "Wut time shud i pik u up?" As opposed to "ring....ring....ring....*click* Hey this is Susie, I'm not here right now, but if you'll leave me your name and number I'll give you a call back at my earliest convenience. Thanks and have a great day! *click* to page this user, press 7. To leave a callback number, press 5. To leave a voice message, press 1 or stay on the line." "Hi Susie, what time should I pick you up? Call me."
And yeah I know you can skip to the "leaving a message" part by pressing 1 but it's still annoying.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The money comes from people phoning you. Voicemail is active as default and most people don't disable it.
When you ring someone else and they don't answer, the voicemail picks up and you pay for one minute of a phone call. That is a lot of money when your customers have thousands of missed calls per day. If the other network reciprocates, then the networks have a tidy income and the customers pay to listen to a robot beep at them.
I'm glad someone else has noticed this, it is one of the things I hate the most about mobile phones. I see it as a clear way by the networks to squeeze more money out of their customers.
A friend has recently got a new job, and with it got a work mobile phone. It goes to voice mail after just 12 seconds of ringing! His own personal phone/SIM that he has had for years probably has VM as an cost-free option, but it hasn't been enabled (the way that seemed to be the default a few years back - mine's the same on a different network) - so it'll ring for up to 1 minute then cut off with a dead line - and no charge is made.
I can imagine that a bunch of suits at tmobile/o2/orange.... had some meeting one day where they decided how they could "moneytize" (or other awful, bullshit, made-up word) the parts of their services that currently aren't profitable. Whereas normally if you were somewhere with your mobile that had poor network coverage, you could not use your phone. But with "free voicemail" as part of the service, if people called you then the caller would get charged, even though they couldn't get hold of you! If people called you whilst you were on the phone, instead of a charge-free engaged tone, it dumps you to VM! Bonuses all round for these suits! And now an excuse to put off upgrading the network too.
All that was required is that all networks have the same policy when it comes to voicemail, and even though I try my best to ignore the BS that surrounds mobile phones and their services, I have noticed that free voicemail seems to be a selling point from all networks these days, and has been for a good while. Traditionally this would have been known as collusion, but these days it is "aligning our synergies".
Is there a GSM phone out there that has a feature that will auto-hang up a call after x seconds if the call has not been answered? Ideally x would be configurable for each phone number in your address book, so as to get around the bullshit practices of the networks.
But lets be honest - the biggest customers of phone manufacturers are the networks themselves, so features on phones are really dictated by the networks, not the users.
Car analogies break down.
if you call 911 and get voice mail you are screwed any ways
If you want to give me textual voice mail then find, BUT:
1) Please interpret the inflection on the callers voice with 99.98% accuracy and give me smilies to indicate, and
2) Please give me a solution that does NOT require filtering/processing by a third party.
voice mail is included in the definition of 'electronically stored information'. I have read that already the federal courts say that parties in a law suit must preserve, and make available for review, all relevant electronically stored information. -immediate transcription to text for all calls, every time, may save some headache. I believe the state courts model their rules after the federal and, at the least, try to bring their rules to being able to boost those of the federal.
cjacobs001
Perhaps it should be, "Time For Voice-Mail to Get an Interface Overhaul".
Serious geeks may not have a problem, but not everyone wants to buy the latest phones or use a netbook to check phone messages. I know people who use phones all day but still can't switch inputs between satellite and their DVD player.
A gargantuan software company (now defunct) had such a voicemail system in the early 1990s, allowing people to send voicemails as you would an email, and even address multiple people and groups. When used sparingly it was great. Unfortunately, the company developed a voicemail subculture among folk who couldn't or wouldn't type, and the tool was ruined. Imagine getting dozens of voicemails every day, from sales people, managers, and the CEO. Which ones can you ignore without getting fired? It's difficult to assess without listening to all of them. That burned over an hour a day, for each employee.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
"No more listening to at least a bit of each voice-mail message"
(no you read it instead...)
"hearing the same instructional prompts between each"
(VZW's voice mail doesn't make me listen, I can dial right while it's talking)
"and worrying about whether it's 9-to-archive and 7-to-skip (or vice versa)."
Umm, I don't have this problem either, after using the VM a few times, I remembered 7 to delete, 9 to save, and * to hang up.
----
*Personally*, getting my VMs as texts would suit me fine and actually sounds pretty sweet. But I don't see it obsoleting Voice Mail. Especialy since I looked and it's presently invite-only, requires a new phone number, and has transcription errors..sweet. Also, I'm sure it's like 1-800-goog411 where google's privacy policy gives them carte blanche over your voice mails.
I'm surprised no one has really mentioned this in depth.
I give you http://www.youmail.com/
It allows you to receiver your voicemails like emails, it allows you to block certain numbers from being able to leave you a voicemail, and it allows you to have separate greetings for each number if you wish. For example, for spam and bill collectors I leave an ATT generic error message, leading them to believe that my number is no longer in service.
You can save, download, and archive your voicemails, and you can even share them on Facebook if you'd like. And yes, if you have a smartphone, there's also visual voicemail.
The best part? No stupid menus. You go to access your voicemail on your phone, and it goes into the latest messages within a second. Callers also don't have to wait. It's literally like 'hey this is so and so I'm not around' *beep*
Give it a shot. I swear by it.
Quite a bit of assembly required, actually....
Google is a great company, but it's really beginning to worry me that a company as large as they are with the tremendous overhead they have is crushing companies left and right in their quest of world domination.
I do believe Google just wants to make great technology and make it available to everyone, but for the moment, they're riding a gray train where they have the luxury to be able to give away services for free to everyone, but it is crushing many companies quickly.
- Browser market
- Map market
- Navigation market
- GIS market
- online e-mail market
- online storage market
- telephone platform market
- speech recognition market
- VoiP market
- Video conferencing market
- Translation market
I can go on for a while, but Google is putting out applications ranging in quality from mediocre to great in all these different markets which are making it impossible for other vendors who offer exception products to compete since Google is supporting most of these businesses using an advertising model or otherwise which may or may not be sustainable over the long term.
In the end, if the advertising market bottoms out for some reason or another company begins to offer a better service (somehow) then not only has Google been crushed, but all the markets which have been monopolized by Google because of offering services online for free have disolved an we're left with nothing.
I want to see some regulation on Google which would make it so that as they monopolize markets, they are forced to make it possible for someone else to take over where they left off in case Google goes tits-up or just loses interest.
Yes, I meant the sender would set the priority based on the time criticality of the message and/or importance, etc., using expected adult behavior, and yes, that would include using a low priority flag if the message was in fact low(er) priority. The recipient would have to be psychic to know what priority is in advance in most cases so it would by default be mostly the sender's responsibility. And yes, I would expect the sender, anyone who I might expect to receive a voicemail from, at least in my meatspace circle of friends and relatives, to use common sense and act appropriately. If the sender abused it enough to become annoying, the recipient could have an override on any messages from them, or just block them, whatever. As to outlook, never even seen it, never used windows much at all, and never as my day to day desktop, so I have no idea how that works there.
This is a little offtopic.
Many people carry mobile phone that are more powerful than yesteryear. Also, many people use aim/gtalk/twitter or other presence or microblogging services and many of those people are liberal in allowing the whole world to know their "status".
When *the default* mobile phone application books can integrate your friends' availability, this will change the way we communicate. This will also alleviate many of the "please call me back" voicemails.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
This is the main reason I use a service like youmail.com which gives me a visual text interface to my voicemail so I can just read most of my messages and reply to them by e-mail.
The thing with Google is that the name is becoming more buzz than substance. They mark something, like a fire hydrant, and everybody suddenly forgets that there are others in the world who do it better.
G-Voice has some nice features but the transcription service isn't really that good and it's still a kind repackaged voicemail with the Google scent on it.
YouMail provides a much better (also free) service. Every caller can have their own customized greeting which you can assign from a selection of 1000's of pre-recorded greetings. Most of these are hysterical. My personal favorite, which I use a lot, is a recording of an East Indian man who answers with the proper accent: "The person you have called has outsourced their voicemail to India. I am (long Indian name anglos can't pronounce) but you can call me Tom. ..." But I also have John Cleese, from his best MP skits, answering for other family members. For business associates I have something appropriately professional and for telemarketers, etc., a recording plays that indicates my number is no longer valid.
They also provide a transcription service which is amazing with nearly 100% accuracy. Most times I *read* my voice messages from my phone.
For BlackBerry users they have a great native visual voicemail application, and you don't need the latest model or your carrier's cooperation to use it. I've heard an Android and iPhone version is coming soon. For all other phones they have a nice visual voicemail web interface. And none of this requires that you call to get your voicemail. No more listening to the mechanized voice telling you to press #9 or press #7... You can play the message directly from your phone with a single click.
--DH
"Not to beat a dead horse, but I do find the hollow thumping sound soothing..."
Orange used to have a real person answer the phone and send you a text message but stop it a few years ago.
I rather like my SpinVox service. It get it right mroe time than wrong, as well as testing it can email to multiple addresses. So from a voice mail I get a text, email home and email work. Which means I have a mini address book on email, as the subject line contain the calling number.
If you are going to advertise the new tech of some toy like this -- at least provide a way to signup to this 'invite-only' service.
It's so nice to hear about how the original article author has been so happy to use this Elite-invitation Only service -- it would be nice for them not to flaunt how happy they are to a public audience and expect us to be grateful or respectful for flaunting the fact that they are in the "elite, invite-only" group, and all the benefits of being in the group -- while giving no way for his readers or for slashdot-readers to sign-up or get an invite.
Sorta like that neat new Intel laptop with the builtin graphics processor I've been happy with now for a year and that you can't get -- the one with 256 processors that can act as 256-multi-way x86-Atom processors with a shared cache that use .7W ea, if all active, or 0 when not needed -- that can have arbitrary numbers of them configured as 3-D graphics accelerator cores, giving the ability to run the latest 3-D-compute intensive games in 100's of frames/second on its builtin-1920x1200 (w/full Hi-Def 1920x1080p support) screen, or using it's DVI or HDMI outputs for a larger screen. It's setup to dual boot in WinXP or Linux with the full 3D accel drives available from Intel (when you are eventually allowed access to the product, the drivers will be open-sourced, but it will only be sold with Vista Home Basic, included).
Yeah -- just the type of article us tech-heads love to read -- brings back fond memories. Here we are in the adult 'tech' world, where we are used to our tech-creds giving us accessibility to the latest tech (by virtue of latest tech usually being available, but incomprehensible to lay-people, so only us 'tech-heads' usually have access -- though it's all "merit" based, so it's ok, anyone who wants to access it, simply has to apply themselves to understand the tech! :-) But this 'invite-only' stuff...memory of highschool, where our tech-cred was considered outcast-nerd-dom, and even in our 20-30-something days, meant we usually weren't the ones who swept past the front of the line (not being one of the beautiful people), unless we were going in the side or back door to be one of the sound-visual tech-heads to support bands with heavy computer-sound and visual effect processing (earliest I can remember was D'Cuckoo back in the early 90's around SF. They used SGI-O2's for graphix and sounds effects to create light visuals and some audio processing...a music-loving geek's paradise job). But outside of those few opportunities....feeling like the outsider is always a lovely feeling.
*snort*
Welcome our crack-smoking journalist brethren!
Quack, quack.
You guys that are hating on voice mail must never have had their wives/girlfriend(s) leave them a hot and steamy message describing in great detail what they want to do and how they are going to do it, to you.
Speech to Text simply doesn't capture the moment.
Here in EU nobody uses voice mail. Nobody knows it. I had to wikipedia it to understand what voice mail even is.