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So Long Voicemail, Give My Regards To the Fax Machine
itwbennett writes: Yes, it was just a matter of time before voicemail, the old office relic, the technology The Guardian's Chitra Ramaswamy called "as pointless as a pigeon with a pager," finally followed the fax machine into obscurity. Last week JPMorgan Chase announced it was turning off voicemail service for tens of thousands of workers (a move that CocaCola made last December). And if Bloomberg's Ramy Inocencio has the numbers right, the cost savings are significant: JPMorgan, for example, will save $3.2 million by cutting voicemail for about 136,000. As great as this sounds, David Lazarus, writing in the LA Times, warns that customer service will suffer.
...will be when they realize not everyone tht spelz lyk dis is a teenager.
On the upside, they could use that as a way to lay off people too lazy to spell "what", "are", "you" and other amazingly difficult words.
"Dear Mr. Smith,
GTFO, lol.
kthxbai,
Management" ... I'm stuck on 2007, aren't I?
All glory to Arstotzka!
Except when the majority of people you get a voicemail from has a sufficiently thick accent that transcription leaves an indecipherable jumble of words.
"My car hill devil cream pewter shakes dawn under noticable with. Read line on palestine." is an actual transcription of a single sentence of a voicemail I received from a client. Allow me to relay what the customer actually said in the recording:
"My goddamn computer shut down without notice and there's a red light on the power brick." (This turned out to be from a short that developed in the client's $3 powered USB hub that he got off ebay, for those interested.)
My voicemail gets full of these types of transcriptions daily, and I frankly find them useless. Sometime's they'll be closer to where there's enough context that makes it through to decipher the message. Unfortunately, more often than not, the transcriptions are worse than the example I used. I've used both Sprint's offering for Visual Voicemail (on promo only...it wasn't worth paying for), and Google hangouts VV. Neither are worth having.