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

[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

[interkin3tic]

I also ignore my voicemail. Big problem though: Mom.

Hearing "Hello you have reached 'Mother, please, we've been over this, do NOT leave a message, I'll call you back without checking my voice mail anyway, and voicemail is annoying'..." only makes her leave upset messages on my voice mail. Failure to set up my voice mail so that she can't leave any message only leads to that being the sole topic of conversation every time we actually DO talk on the phone.

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying "Please, let voice mail die faster so my mother can't leave extremely long rambling messages which I have to listen to or face the penalty."

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

[supernova_hq]

If you move out, she won't have to leave you a message saying dinner is ready.

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

[Like2Byte]

Oh. My. God! I have this same problem with my father.

Call #1: Short and sweet, "Hey, son, gimme a call."
Call #2: with an angry tone and bent, "How come you never answer your phone. No one can ever get a hold of you."
      Makes me *really* want to call him back. Not.
Call #3: Just as angry....same message as #2, now with more filler and far more colorful.
Call #4: So angry there is about 10 seconds of silence on the phone, then, "Fuck it!" and hangs up.

Seriously, if they weren't so full of hate because I wasn't able (or unwilling) to answer, they'd be hilarious.

Recently, and this is a no shitter. I called my parents to get the number to one of my cousins. Got the number and gave the cousin a call. I left a message because he wasn't there. Hours later I'm mountain biking in an area with VERY bad reception (mostly only enough reception for text messages).
My phone rings a few times. Three messages are left. I imagine it's my cousin trying to return my call. (I dont stop while mountain biking in a bad reception areas because it's usually futile.)
Here's a transcript of those messages:

Msg #1, (Cousin): Hey, man, I got your message, just returning your call.
Msg #2, (Cousin): Ok, just me again, you must be busy.
Msg #3, (father): (in an angry voice from the *start*!) Carl. Kevin called us and he is *trying* to call you. You called him to get a hold of him because you had specific questions and now you wont answer your god damned phone. No one can..yadda yadda yadda.

Yeah, I'm thinking that killing voice mail makes a lot of sense. Of course, if that happens I'd have to listen to my father directly. Yeah, that's going to be fun. Not.

Prolog
  While I wrote this up expecting Informative I'm sure it's going to get modded Funny.
  Also, save your typing. We all know father has issues.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[D Ninja]

I'm honestly surprised that he even gets cell phone reception in the basement.

Re:i ignore voice mail

[MBaldelli]

Diatribe snipped

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

There. Fixed that for you.

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.

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

[ewrong]

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.

That's great...

[kirbysuperstar]

..if you live in America. I'm pretty sure Google Voice isn't available elsewhere.

Re:That's great...

[AlexBirch]

This isn't available to everyone in the USA, just the Grand Central customers. This has been one of Google's larger failures.

Ah yes transcription

[blowdart]

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.

Of course, the next Google killer-app...

[kclittle]

... will be a text-to-voice service that will read your Google Voice mail to you...

Pfft!

[msimm]

"Beyond which, human voice can impart additional meaning in tone that text can't."

Bah! I fully expect my transcribed voice mail to include :-D lulz ROFLcopter )-': to impart those more nuanced details.

Re:as a deaf person

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

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.

I dunno...

[MichaelTheDrummer]

Listening to drunken messages left on my voicemail is often the highlight of a Sunday morning hangover.

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:Sometimes vocals are necessary

[Anonymous Coward]

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

No, it's not the end of Voicemail

[el_flynn]

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.