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."
..if you live in America. I'm pretty sure Google Voice isn't available elsewhere.
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.
Well, all that you say is true, but that isn't what I meant.
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.
This message was scanned by European governments and contains no terrorism.
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.
Most of them work that way, although often the email only contains a link to the audio file, not the file itself. If you want the file sent so you can hear it when offline, try Phone Tag http://phonetag.com/ I have used them, and Google Voice, for a while. Their accuracy is (obviously) MUCH better than Google Voice, because they are using humans to do the transcription.
I suggest you find somebody with an iPhone and try visual voicemail. It's like e-mail, except you listen to the messages instead of reading them, and in any order you choose. You can swipe back and forth in the message to re-listen to parts, and the slider shows time elapsed and time remaining while listening to the message. The message is labeled with the time and date of the call as well as the caller's name if in your contacts list.
At the start of the year, I tried going back to a Motorola RAZR for daily use, and the first thing that I missed enough to go back was visual voicemail.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
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 will assume from this statement that you know of no young people who may be trying to find a new job. Not checking voicemail can easily amount to a missed job opportunity, particularly if the employer is calling from his or her own cell that may have a blocked number and won't show up in your call display (which in my experience doesn't seem to be that infrequent).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Verizon Wireless has a ton of phones with visual voicemail. Also, if you have a blackberry, you can sign up for youmail (or is it umail) which does the same thing.
Xaotik Designs
I read slate regularly and this guy's headlines have gotten on my nerves. I see three or four of them each week sucking up to the latest features being developed by Google and Facebook. After I read a couple it became clear that not only does he not have an inkling of what goes into the tech to make it successful he never delves into alternatives. It's as though he, and anyone reading his vapid column, has no use for a computer other than as a social networking box. Maybe this is appropriate for a 'culture site' like Slate but I'd rather go there for politics and find my technology analysis elsewhere.
http://www.slydial.com/