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.
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.
"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.
Yeah, I'm sure all your friends will be glad you finally stop ignoring their voicemail messages. Until now they must've been thinking you were rude.
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
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.
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....
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
Listening to drunken messages left on my voicemail is often the highlight of a Sunday morning hangover.
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."-
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...
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
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