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."

Comments

i ignore voice mail

[wjh31]

it costs me to listen to it, and if it's important enough, they'll call again or leave a text or something

Re:i ignore voice mail

[linzeal]

Yeah, I have listened to my voice messages like 10 times since 1996. It is a cumbersome way to try to communicate someone. Since 2006 my current voicemail box has been full since Verizon does not allow you to choose to not have the service.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[TubeSteak]

it costs me to listen to it

On most networks, if you call your own phone number, you get kicked over to voicemail and it is considered an in-network call (AFAIK) that doesn't cost you anything.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[quenda]

Thats a bit rude!
Why don't you just turn it off so they don't get prompted to leave a message? Its ##21# to cancel all diverts.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[Frnknstn]

If you are able to ignore your voicemail, then YOU aren't important enough.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[dbcad7]

But isn't that the same time you would have spent if you had answered the call in the first place ?.. and isn't it kind of selfish to make someone call you back a second time?.. I mean isn't their time money too ? ... With a few exceptions, most people don't want to leave a voice mail, so the fact that they do, either means they want to give you information, or to tell you to call them back. To ignore voice mails altogether is just being crappy and rude.. and if you legitimately have that many people who leave pointless time wasting voice mails, then it makes more sense to get a new number with ID blocking, and don't give it to those people.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[PopeRatzo]

I'd be careful to think that voice mail is only an 'absurdly backward mode of human-computer interaction'. Since I am hearing a person's voice, it is a 'human-human' interaction and one that's rich in information if you care about details.

There is more information and meaning in a 15 second voice mail than in any text. Is the caller angry? Sad? Frustrated? What did the environment he was calling from sound like?

If you think that simply converting all voice mail to text is going to solve the problem, you're missing out. I would think that a jog-wheel to allow me to speed up the voice mails, along with some audio or visual cues to let me know when the message ends would be much more efficient than speech-to-text while maintaining all the meta-information. Just get rid of those stupid menus completely. Since it's trivial to speed up a person's voice without altering the pitch using DSP you'd still be able to understand the message at 10x speed (or more) and still keep the subtler message intact.

I know some voice mail systems already allow speeding up the message, but it's not very intuitive and you still get those awful menus. Plus, the voice on the menus speaks So. Fucking. Slowly. When. They. Tell. You. What. Time. The. Person. Who. Left. The. Message. Called.

I would think that information could be imparted to me much more quickly. Yes voice-mail systems suck. Text is not necessarily the answer unless I can get a great novelist to pre-screen the messages and then write me a few paragraphs describing what the person said and how they said it, etc. Even so, I like hearing my wife's voice. She's got an accent that is like music to my ears and never fails to make me smile even after all these years. Happy mothers day from the kid and me, ljubavi.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[Tony Hoyle]

I've not heard of anyone that actually used voicemail for ages.. voicemail has lots of problems:

1. It's linear. It takes ages to go through it and you have to listen to some inane woffle whilst they get to the point.
2. It's expensive - they pay to leave the message *and* you pay to pick it up! no deal.
3. SMS exists. Free, simple, easy to scan through - and what pretty much everyone is using these days.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[bondsbw]

Like you, I seem to be one of the few people who actually likes the concept of "voice" mail. But I also think it is flawed, because voicemail fails to accomplish true delayed voice interaction.

With email, I can send a message expecting that the receiver will get around to it whenever they want. IM is the opposite; the receiver is expected to respond immediately. Each of these has its place in the world... if not, email would have died many years ago.

Phone calls mirror IMs in the voice world. But voicemail can only be sent when a person fails to answer a phone call. I think this is a flaw. It might sound nit-picky, but sometimes I want to send someone a voice message without them dropping everything to attend to me. Maybe I want to send it while driving... not that I recommend use of the phone while driving, but it's far better to voice message than to text message.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[nine-times]

Plus, the voice on the menus speaks So. Fucking. Slowly. When. They. Tell. You. What. Time. The. Person. Who. Left. The. Message. Called.

The "visual voicemail" on the iPhone is really a pretty good solution. Phone-based menu systems suck, but there's nothing wrong with voicemail itself.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[MBaldelli]

Diatribe snipped

Also, save your typing. I know I have father issues.

There. Fixed that for you.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[timeOday]

There is more information and meaning in a 15 second voice mail than in any text. Is the caller angry? Sad? Frustrated? What did the environment he was calling from sound like?

We have a whole generation of people who grew up with the textual Internet. I think they are more comfortable communicating by text, either because they're better writers, or because they have a richer set of conventions for conveying emotion that way, or because they are accustomed to the emotional ambiguity.

The question isn't whether you get more information from a 60 second voicemail than you get from skimming an email in 10 seconds; the contest is between listening to 1 voicemail or skimming 6 emails.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[david in brasil]

Beans. For making deals, getting people's buy-in, collaborating on ideas, etc., never text or email when you can talk on the phone. Never talk on the phone when you can talk face to face. You can seclude yourself in a don't-bother-me text cocoon, but that doesn't make you more productive.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[cortesoft]

All of that is the opposite with my plan and phone (iPhone on AT&T here in the US)...

1) Voicemail is easy to use (not linear, you can scan through to the end of messages, replay them, skip messages, etc)
2) It's free... always free to listen to the message, and free to leave if they are on AT&T, call from a landline, or call on evenings.
3) Texts are certainly NOT free. 10 cents each to send and receive... or $20 bucks a month for unlimited...

So clearly things aren't always the same.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[Coyote65]

Everyone in your clique, maybe. It's hard enough to get the boss to send emails from a machine with a keyboard, now you want the old dog to text? You're nuts. Here's a tip for the under 25 crowd: Tech trends are decided on a longer cycle than you (or I) have been alive. You may have had email all your life, but your granny's in her 70s and had at least 55 years of life without email. Crap, granny may not have had a phone in the house when she was a girl.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[oldhack]

Jee, that's even more asinine than what I do. I only return calls if they leave a voice mail - i.e., important enough for them to leave a message.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[westlake]

I still stand by the belief that the symbol of power, the REAL status symbol of the future, will be the ability to be completely unreachable.

If you want distance, you hire a secretary.

If you want power, you must remain approachable. Out of sight, out of mind.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[Mister_Stoopid]

That sounds a little better, but I still have to listen to the whole message at least once to figure out what's in there. Someone should make an iphone app that is exactly like visual voicemail, but also displays a text-to-speech version of the voicemail while you're playing it back. Preferably you would also be able to set it for "text only" mode or "text first, play audio if I tell you to" mode. That I could tolerate.

Two words, one of which is two words.

[Xenex]

Visual voicemail.

The concept of voicemail is sound; the technology has been poor. Visual voicemail fixes the technology.

Re:Two words, one of which is two words.

[David Gerard]

As TFA points out, by encouraging you to use the metadata - who called and when - and just delete the actual voicemail.

Re:Two words, one of which is two words.

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Visual Voicemail does show the phone number, and it will stay on your screen for a long time.

Does it still work if caller ID is blocked? Can it tell if the person wants you to call back on a different number? And what about other info that doesn't have anything to do with where the caller is calling from, such as an address, quote for an item number, etc...

And if you can't "quite make out" some piece of information, how do you expect a computer to do so?

Because the person sending it will be typing it out and seeing it on a display before they send it. I don't care about Google's text-to-speech thing because that's still partly voice mail.

Not anytime soon

[AuMatar]

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.

Re:Not anytime soon

[ledow]

I agree. This is like saying that fax is obsolete because we have text/handwriting recognition. You are throwing away *far* too much is you image->text or speech->text, although they could be used for summary/convenience in certain cases. And sometimes you need alternate methods of communication - putting everything into the same basket (i.e. your email account) is just stupid.

Additionally, the loss of information doesn't necessarily make it more convenient at all. You go on holiday, lose/break your phone and swap the sim card (maybe with a borrowed phone). You don't *necessarily* get the capability to receive that text (e.g. Internet, email, etc.) but you can still listen to your voicemail. It's low-tech, but sometimes that helps.

Personally, I detest voicemail whether on mobile phones or in the office. It's a pain. But it still exists, gets specified and built-in because it's "free", easy, simple and works. It's for a medium that doesn't have a better alternative for saving messages (voice) and thus it isn't going anywhere. And I don't trust *anything* that claims to be able to do a "human" job... translating, understanding, transcribing, recognising, etc. Why? Because they cause more trouble than they are worth unless you want a quick, casual, inaccurate job. This includes any form of handwriting recognition, OCR, "image recognition" (web filter systems etc.), speech recognition, text-to-speech, computer translation, etc.

Re:Not anytime soon

[krunk4ever]

I agree, especially when Google Voice's text to speech only does English at the moment.

I may be in the smaller crowd here, but I hate phone calls and use voicemail to screen calls. When I say "screen", I'm also referring to the urgency.

When someone calls me and either I don't know the number calling in nor I don't feel like talking on the phone at that particular moment (even if it's someone I know), I use voicemail to screen.

If the call is important enough, they'll leave a voicemail or try calling again later. If they don't leave a voicemail, I don't bother calling back since I deem the call wasn't really urgent/necessary.

Re:Not anytime soon

[Jeff DeMaagd]

[quote]If they don't leave a voicemail, I don't bother calling back since I deem the call wasn't really urgent/necessary.[/quote]

The problem is that there really doesn't seem to be an agreed-upon social convention, and all these differences get to be irritating and reduce productivity or connectivity. Some people don't leave messages under any circumstances, so you're not going to get them from those people. Some people turn off refuse to check their voicemail or turn it off. I've had cases where voicemail was turned off and that was the only way to communicate to them in a reasonable time frame. These idiosyncrasies are annoying.

Re:Not anytime soon

[nine-times]

This is like saying that fax is obsolete because we have text/handwriting recognition.

No, fax is obsolete because it's a stupid technology. Scan it to PDF and email it.

Sorry, I know it's off-topic, but I get annoyed whenever someone asks me to fax something, or wants to fax me something. You may as well be asking me to dial into your BBS system so we can share files.

Re:Not anytime soon

[nine-times]

You might as well say that phone is obsolete because we have VoIP or Skype.

I would say normal phone service will be obsolete when everyone can get an Internet connection with enough bandwidth to handle VoIP. Until then, it's safe. I also think that, sooner or later, after we all have enough bandwidth to download HD video with no problem, cable TV providers and even TV "channels" may become obsolete.

But anyone who can fax something can get Internet access capable of sending/receiving emails. Fax technology in this day and age is approaching "silly".

Re:Not anytime soon

[krunk4ever]

If it was a urgent call and given that they have no way of confirming that I got the missed call notification, I would say it's upon the caller to call again or try to contact me in some other way.

as a deaf person

[Anonymous Coward]

this is pretty cool and very useful.

Has this guy never used an iPhone?

[Graymalkin]

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.

Re:Has this guy never used an iPhone?

[AlexBirch]

I have a few friends like you, who assumed I would see all missed calls. This assumption is dangerous, especially if you have AT&T. If you are going to call someone, for the love of all that's good and holy, at least have one sentence summary about why you're doing it.

~~
The most exquisite folly is made of wisdom too fine spun.
~ Benjamin Franklin

language barrier?

[Krupuk]

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.

Sometimes vocals are necessary

[dontmakemethink]

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.

Re:Sometimes vocals are necessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that you've communicated it to us perfectly well using text.

Re:Sometimes vocals are necessary

[Anubis IV]

Also, texting is an inherently less personal medium than vocal communication, and for many people is perceived as inappropriate in certain situations. When you have a personal favor to ask of someone, adding a personal touch by actually talking to them, even if it's only indirectly via a voicemail, goes a long way.

Not A Chance In Hell.....

[IHC Navistar]

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.

Thinly veiled advertisement for a new service

[petes_PoV]

Google voice is not generally available and is due to be rolled out soon.

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.

Different Languages?

[Faizdog]

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.

Re:That's great...

[AlexBirch]

Please at least read my post before responding. I didn't say that the service was a failure, just that Google hasn't delivered as promised. They announced that it was going to be rolled out to everyone who wanted an account back in March and they haven't done it. If I were the only person without an account it'd be different.
As Ben Franklin said, "Promises may get thee friends, but non-performance will turn them into enemies."

Yeah, right...

[dwm]

...just like email killed faxes.

Leaving voicemail is worse...

[meta-monkey]

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.