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."
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.
Indeed as an Englishman I've only ever managed to get any speech recognition software to work by putting on a fake American accent. Considering people who leave voicemails for me regularly come from places such as The Netherlands, France or India, so are using a second language, I think it's going to be a long time before something like this is actually useful.
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.
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