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'Only Voice Memos Can Save Us From the Scourge of Email' (qz.com)
Emails are great -- so much so that many believe that it's one of the best inventions of all time. But when you get hundreds of emails everyday, things could get harder to handle. Understandably, many have resorted to alternatives such as Slack, Gchat, and other IM services to offload many of the things they previously did exclusively via emails. An article on Quartz today argues that perhaps voice notes is the best alternative to emails. From their article: There's a solution staring us right in the face: a technological tool that preserves the intimacy of the human voice without requiring people to sync up their schedules. As a number of remote workers, diaspora communities and expats have already discovered, voice notes might just be the answer we've been waiting for. Barcelona-based filmmaker Philippa Young, for example, relies on WhatsApp's voice notes to communicate with her nomadic yet tight-knit team of 15. She sends audio notes throughout the day that range from just a few seconds in length to 10 minutes. The system allows her far-flung coworkers to respond whenever the sun rises in their time zone or they manage to find a stable wifi connection. [...] Voice notes also offer an antidote to one of the primary anxieties of the digital era "the fear that emails, texts and instant messaging rob conversation of emotional nuance, leading to endless misunderstandings and social blunders. "The thing that I really value about it for our team spread out across the world is that when I get a voice note from someone, they've spoken to me and I hear their tone of voice," Young adds. "You can hear in someone's voice how they're feeling."
Sounds bloody annoying.
I suppose this is somehow related to ads. If I woul get an ad in the form of a voicemail I would hunt down the sender and punish him physically.
Sounds great, but you can read faster than you can listen to someone talking. Do you really want to have to listen to dozens, or even hundreds, of messages every day? Isn't this why people hate their voicemail?
We already fought this battle once... the enemy at that point was Voice Mail (may it rest in peace).
Unnecessary email is annoying, but easily dealt with. Unnecessary voice mail is the scourge of the earth. There is no way to easily flip through it to see if there is something interesting buried in there and people are apt to leave messages that are FAR too long. Further, I can read WAY faster than I can listen to someone slowly get around to the point of their message.
No: voice mail failed for good reasons... and it needs to stay dead.
Eeek! Email text I can quickly scan for relevant information. If I have to listen to someone speak, I can't quickly scan for relevant information if they're rambling about something I don't need to hear.
Obviously they have never experienced what it's like to get a voice memo from someone like this:
helloit'skatefrommarketing mycomputerisdeadandiwaswondering ifyoucouldstopeverythingyourdoing andcometakealookatitmynumberis 1234567890kthanksbye
Spoken at the rate of a bazillion syllables per minute. Where you have to listen to the damn thing six times just so you can write down their name and number to call them back :|
They may not think so highly of their email alternative afterwards. . . . .
That way my employees can know the subtle complexities of my farts. If only we had smell to go along with it, but technology has failed us so far.
I already ignore my 3 voicemail boxes. I can't stand youtube "articles" where they drone on for 20 minutes in what should have been a 2 paragraph piece of text.
I can scan over a few hundred emails in the time it takes to listen to a single voicemail, which is all this is.
Just because you disagree doesn't mean it's not true.
Voice can help you understand the EMOTION behind a person's communication. But text is far better at passing INFORMATION.
"What did you say? Was that FEET or SLEET?"
I hate "multimedia".
I want to be able to take in information quietly at my own pace.
I don't want to have to watch a 20 minute video to absorb information I could have obtained with 1 minute of reading and one thousandth the bandwidth.
I don't even want to have to Live Chat someone where I have to be shitting around for 20 minutes to reach the queue and gallop through a to-and-fro of uselessness because the other side has a quota of 50,000 responses/hour to get through and can't properly consider their response either.
And I certainly don't want to have to pick up a telephone and play the escalation game - which inevitably requires recording the call so they don't "not have any record of that conversation, sir".
I don't want to have to use Facebook or Twitter because a company is so unethical that they need to be publicly embarrassed in order to provide service.
I don't want to have to text someone on an awkard keypad with not enough characters to explain the problem and not enough for a useful response either.
I don't want a dedicated online ticketing system where I have to log in and copy-paste the responses before they expire.
In short, give me e-mail. E-mail is great.
Everything else is a solution looking for a problem, and that problem is that the early Internet already solved so much but without getting many people rich.
Voice messages also cannot be categorized, are interpreted much slower than reading, can be very ambiguous if the audio quality is poor, and require significantly more space to store (not a concern if you're one employee with a work drive that's 5% full, but for the employer maintaining a central server, that space stacks up quickly). Honestly, voice memos are basically voice mail on the phone, and while there are times it works well, voice memos are definitely no email replacement.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Only Voice Memos Can Save Us From the Scourge of Email
Yes, in the same way that only pouring battery acid on our crotches can save us from pubic lice.
Forced listening to the boss' 10 minute diatribe? No thanks.
Give me a transcript instead.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
For some people, like myself, it can be difficult to understand a recorded message without visual clues and context. Even with visual clues, I prefer to read most content. If my mind skips a cog I can easily reread the previous sentence, but with a voice recording you spend more time trying to go back, landing in the middle of some previous sentence, listen forward to what you were looking for while retaining the context, and then trying to get back into the stream of what was being said.
with searching last months 1000 voicemails for the specific information you need at the moment. if you really need to get your emotion across, why not use written words? or attach a voice mail to your written message? i prefer a quick phone call to an elaborate email where i'm pretty sure the recipient only reads every second sentence (leading to a trail of follow up and clarification - mails). but this is just ridiculous.
Even if you have good speech-to-text to make the voice messages searchable, you might as well have just stuck with email. No point.
playmoney.me - The free alternative to paper board game play money
We already have this scourge which I couldn't manage to disable in Whatsapp. Instead of just getting a text that would comfortably fit in a line on a mobile, never mind a ~160-character SMS I have to scramble to get some headphones, download the audio and listen for two minutes (that feel like two days) for something like "hi, what's up, errr, hhmmmm, hi, please do that" or "you forgot that".
I'll keep my "intimacy" for my personal partners and not my work colleagues.
Heck, emails are often too long. That's why most of us communicate by text. I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
Voicemails!!!
Email is a security nightmare (encrypted tunnels will likely never be universal, encrypted content is too hard to get working for non-techies, read receipts are worthless for verifying that the intended recipient got the message, and most webmail providers are actively man-in-the-middleing you), and I can never understand voicemail because the quality is often terrible.
Why can't we just switch to instant messaging for everything?
...She sends audio notes throughout the day that range from just a few seconds in length to 10 minutes...
That sounds 100 times worse than emails. At least with emails I can skim them, how do I escape someone droning on and on and on for 10 minutes?
No, sorry. One of the many useful things about emails is that they are searchable. I only delete junk or spammy emails and its not uncommon for me to search them for some bit of information I need. Even some that are years old.
I don't want to go back through 10,000 voice mails looking for some relevant information. Plus, I really don't want to listen to someone rambling on when I could skim it for relevant information in seconds.
Maybe I'm just old and curmudgeonly; but I'm pretty sure that we welcomed email in no small part because of how miserable dealing with voicemail was.
Now some brilliant specimen is patting themselves on the back for reinventing voicemail on top of a new platform? It beats paying international calling rates to your local telco racket and suffering voicemail, I suppose; but that's damning by very, very, faint praise.
- Can't search.
- Can't necessarily even understand (if the audio is muffled, no message at all).
- Require audio equipment (can't listen in a meeting, for example - I'm often involved in meetings where we email out for a quick answer and get it back live while we're making a decision).
- Much larger data storage. My email is already Gigs, but at least I can keep them all on my phone.
- No advantage. Email is deliberately formal to hide the emotional shit and cut to the facts. We need this done, for this reason. Anger can be expressed easily if you want, but it just lengthens and confuses the email. Email from your boss saying "FIX THIS NOW" is quite clear enough, thanks.
- Can't be translated, forwarded, quoted, etc. as easily.
Basically, it's a stupid idea. Email works (and we can't change it BECAUSE it's so successful - we'll need to break email so we can reinvent the protocol soon, people!). If you don't think it does, you're not using it properly.
And little voice memos are like the YouTube tutorial. Takes ten minutes longer to record, review, send and listen to, than just writing down what you mean in clear text. The bane of my life is the information I want being locked inside a voice track to a online presentation or video.
I've spend no end of time huddled round a voicemail saying "What the fuck did they say? Was that "smith"?" and it has just reinforced what I've known for year. Voice sucks.
And, yes, if you want to talk to me (especially if you're a salesman), send me an email. I guarantee a response same-day. Don't try to ring me, then ring round all my colleagues, then ask to be put through to me, then finally get through to me and spend 10 minutes getting to the fucking point. You're just wasting everyone's time and I will ask for quotes, invoices, guarantees, promises and contracts in writing anyway. In fact, my response time by phone unless you're my direct boss is literally days sometimes. It'll get put on the helpdesk if you ask, and from there response times are like any other. But email me and tell me what your company does and next time I need you, I can search.
I can't search my voicemail for that critical authorisation, that company that contacted me weeks ago who offer the service I want, or that memo I took on my phone last week.
In order of uselessness, inefficiency, ability to get confused (and thus require more levels of verification because I won't let you get away with just a confusing voicemail alone):
- Voicemail and audio messages.
- Handwriting on scraps of paper
- Other paper.
- Email or stored notes (e.g. Google Keep).
It doesn't happen too often, but I sometimes need to search my old emails for keywords. This is gold, I can find information that I needed from five, six years ago. One search and kablammo, there it is, dated, timestamped, with the recipient's information right there. Moreover armed with this new information I can go up the chain of emails and see what was happening before then. I tell you it is gold and has saved my ass more than once.
Moreover this summary rings all the warning bells of "hipster douchebag who is infatuated with novelty and wants to discard useful tools in favor of NEW NEW NEW for no damned good reason." Barcelona-based filmmaker, are you kidding me? SO TRENDY. "Nomadic" team? The whole digital nomad thing is SO TRENDY. "they manage to find a stable wifi connection"? Seriously? Even the worst third world crap countries have 3G that works perfectly well for compressed voice messages. Sending and receiving. But the really damning one is the last: "You can hear in someone's voice how they're feeling." This is a sad, desperate cry from someone who is isolated and craves human contact. I think she just needs some real human friends from her own neighborhood.
In fact if you read again, it's not about if email is the right tool for the job. The whole thing is a whimpering paean to human connections. You need voice contact, just make a phone call. BUT apparently that's too much connection, it's scary and confrontational. These poor people...I really pity them. You might think I'm being sarcastic (projection!) but I'm not. They have the same social needs as every human, ever, but their culture tells them that this is a creepy thing and is wrong.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We have cubes that let sounds carry way too well. Often this is helpful to overhear technical discussions that I should eavesdrop on for future reference, or join into to help clear things up. The downside is that talking on the phone, or in this case recording a bunch of voice messages is very intrusive to others who are concentrating, it actually stifles a lot of discussion as we all become very aware that half the team will overheard anything above a whisper.
So unless I have a real office with a door I can shut, then no thank you.
All that said, we recently had an overseas ASIC layout guy help us through a crunch. If I could have easily done screen capture while gesturing instructions with the mouse with voice over I could have reduced the amount of time and effort it took to convey very visual oriented instructions that he needed to clearly understand while I was asleep. Much of the communications was done with a morning call (his end of day) to determine what the snags were, followed up with fresh instructions at my end of day with a status update and scribbled on screen shots. However, I only spent about an hour at most actually making up his instructions over a 2 week period, so the potential savings were not high. Much of the time was spent researching design to make sure I actually understood what the layout guy needed to do.
The problem isn't email or voice mail or voice mail called 'voice memos'. It's people, man. It's always been people.
Look, if you're bad at communication - either producing it or receiving it - you're bad at it. Having a smart phone app that you use to take notes during your commute (plus the ambient noise and pauses from distraction) that you send out at 7 pm, expecting your employees to have linked their personal phone to company email and IM services, and ready to listen and respond ... it's not going to fix things, it'll just move the apparent source of conflict around, spread it out, exacerbate it, obfuscate it, or some combination of the above.
In any given day, the amount of time you should devote to whole-group communication should probably never be more than 15 minutes. If it's taking longer than that, try fixing that issue first, because that IS an issue. Get better at communicating, not just filling pages or airwaves with low-info-density content.
Here's a hint to achieving this: there is no technological mechanism that yet exists which is as information rich as a simple 2-way, face to face meeting. Even video chat isn't as good. You want to communicate with most efficiency, you need to do face to face. So schedule meetings at least a day before (and if you can't, then fix your scheduling problem too!), sit down, look them in the eye, remain focused, and then get back to work.
No! I can check email almost anywhere. I wouldn't want to check voicemail in most public places, and I don't think the people around would be too thrilled either.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The fastest way to catch my attention is to send an email. I got 20+ recruiters calling me each day. It's easier to keep my cellphone turned off.
Voice memos are audio files. That's a lot more bandwidth usage than for a text or email without attachments.
Plus, there's the fact that, while a giant pile of email is never a good thing, tools for sorting text are pretty mature and widely available.
Tools for sorting audio? Even the 'cloud' ones, where you give up all pretense of privacy in exchange for access to the really fancy tech trained on a huge dataset, are mediocre and error prone; and standalone speech to text tend to be pricey, poorly integrated, and still only accurate for the user it has been trained on.
If your problem is that you are missing the personal touch, audio might be better; but if your problem is that you are drowning in a sea of inane chatter, text is the closest thing to a solution, short of restructuring your entire life.
It seems that every new generation feels the need to reach back and resurrect some tech that was painful-but-the-best-we-had 20 years ago and embrace it enthusiastically like they have just discovered a trove of of forgotten Power Crystals from the Lost City of Atlantis.
Note to Hipsters: Next time you want to re-cool-ify some recording medium that -- mysteriously !!! -- died quietly back when you were still wearing plastic pants, please first check with one of us who were at the funeral...
Have you ever HEARD some people on the phone?
I'd rather have a nice, simple text message.
Fuck having to try and decipher somebody's accent and dialect on a crappy line from a crappy cell phone someplace in a giant wind tunnel with loads of background noise.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"Beep... Hey, I've attached a PDF to this voicemail. Please enter the following text into base64 -d to read my attachment:
Upper-case J, upper-case V, upper-case B, upper-case E, upper-case R, lower-case I, number 0, lower-case X, upper-case L, ..."
This will soon become an additional unambiguous signal that the person attempting to communicate with you CANNOT do so.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I'm working in an office environment right now that wouldn't easily permit me to have audio playing. I can put on headphones, but this adds yet another dependency to audio listening, and I wouldn't have a way to reply to communication easily until I left this area, recorded what I needed to say, return to where the wifi is, then send. This sounds like a massive fucking headache. Plus, device dependency becomes a pain in the ass, too. I regularly switch between multiple desktops, laptops, servers, cell phones, and tablets, all of which are connected to the same gmail account. Reading/replying text is fairly painless on all of these devices, but only a couple of them have the audio capabilities even to begin with to handle voice based messages.
Quartz today argues that perhaps voice notes is the best alternative to emails
My phone has this cool new feature that lets me automatically convert Voice notes, and Voicemail in particular, directly to text, and e-mails it to me,
so I can read it in my Inbox. Works great. Highly-recommended. For those annoying times when telemarketers leave voicemail, or some co-worker hasn't learned to e-mail yet.
Forced listening to the boss' 10 minute diatribe? No thanks. Give me a transcript instead.
Agreed but getting a transcript is easier than you might think. I'd stick a screwdriver in my ear before I'd listen to voicemails but I use a voicemail service that transcribes the voicemail for me automatically. I can still listen to it if there is a good reason to but I almost never do. Plenty of services that do this (Google Voice, Youmail, etc). I've been using it for years and it works great.
Honestly I'm kind of surprised that Apple hasn't included something like this in their "visual voicemail". It's fast to dictate a message but comparatively slow to listen to one. It's fast to read a message but slow to write one. So a voice memo that gets transcribed can be a good thing in the right circumstances.
Can anyone who has used these apps explain how exactly it differs from voice mail?
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
if (!realtime) { // unassailable truth of the universe
text > voice
}
Don't associate people who having nothing to say, but insist on saying it constantly. If your job really requires that you get hundreds of emails a day, odds are, you really should be replaced by a robot. Made out of Legos. With no moving parts.
Honestly, the way some people talk on the phone makes listening to their voice mail annoying as hell. They ramble, go off topic, clear their throat, go on and on, and finally get around to telling you what you need about when the time limit expires. So then they have to call again, tell you all about how the previous voice mail cut them off, ramble a bit, repeat as needed.
I fucking hate voice mail.
I suspect the reason she likes the voicemail so much is that she types like 3 words a minute using one finger.
But if you switch to voicemail, you're shutting out the deaf coworker. So how can both mobility disabilities and hearing disabilities be accommodated?
I use a voicemail service that transcribes the voicemail for me automatically.
How does it handle "international" accents?
It's fast to read a message but slow to write one.
It depends on how it's written. On a phone, you might be right. But on a computer with a full-size (or nearly so) keyboard, 80 wpm is more than possible. Anyone who routinely gets the "Slow Down Cowboy!" error message on Slashdot can attest to this.
haveyoutriedturningitoffandonagain
If you get 100 emails per day then you want a damn bloody good and bullet proof way of searching for content when needed. Good luck doing that with voicemail.
I love that absolutely everyone except the author hates this idea.
Hi. I'm Deaf.
I think that about covers it.
WhatsApp Voice Message comes with several other big advantages as well. It's free, and unlike FaceTime or Skype, asynchronous, so it's convenient to use across time zones and doesn't require scheduling in advance. While other voice messaging options exist on apps including iMessage, Line and Viber, WhatsApp has the distinction of being integrated into a platform that people all over the world already use.
but:
Our different media choices are actually part of the message itself now,
This is why my chosen medium is rocks and broken bottles.
2. an solution to an actual problem -- for one specific subset:
A lot of this popularity is owed to the fact that it offers Chinese users a break from the laborious work of typing in Chinese characters, which requires searching for characters that convey both the correct meaning and pronunciation.
...
"Typing out Chinese characters is such a pain, so it was easy to adapt to voice message because it's very convenient"
3.
"The practical benefit of saying an awful lot without having to turn your slightly inarticulate thoughts into an articulate email is obvious," Young, who is also a friend of mine, tells me in an audio note.
Dear Cthulhu, take me now!
One of the main reasons I LIKE email is that it gives the sender time to organize their thoughts. Much better than listening to some user or boss hem and haw and backtrack and contradict themselves wasting endless minutes of my life.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Voice/audio will never be better than text (email) because RAM is always better than SAM (sequential access memory). When you are listening to some audio, you are processing information sequentially and you have to listen to the whole thing to get it. When you have the entire text in front of you, you can jump around as needed, to speed up processing. Not just skipping ahead to get past overly verbose explanations, but also going back a sentence or two for a second read in case you are not quite getting the point. Try that with a voicemail: "What did he mean by "that other time"?! ah, right, I think he was going on about it earlier. I guess I'm going to have to listen to the whole thing one more time. Dammit, I spaced out again during that long tangent, what was the point he was trying to make after all? I guess I'm going to have to listen to the whole thing the third time."
Also, when you are the one doing the reading, you have full control over the speed. You can slow down during complicated parts, giving yourself time to get it, and speed up over trivial stuff. Not so much with voicemail: can't just slow down someone's speech, or speed it up as needed.
You can get a domain name for $10/yr, and a VPS to set up your own mail server for less than $5/mo.
For a total of $70 per year to avoid giving a cell phone number to a freemail provider. That might be a good tradeoff if you currently don't subscribe to any form of mobile phone service. Otherwise, a burner phone might run $100 per year.
I don't even read my own voice memos. Lots of luck getting me to deal with anyone else's.
I'm very protective of my multi-media experiences. You want to drive me away? Load up on motion videos. Want to drive me away permanently? Make them auto-play audio at me.
If I had a boss who kept peppering me with voice messages all day long, I'd quickly be looking for another boss. It's bad enough when they do it in person, but at least the look of rage on my face when I'm interrupted in a delicate task makes them more considerate.
Offtopic I know, but am I the only one getting really tired of this trend in web design where I click through to read an article, but first must scroll down past a giant full-page image? This is what I see when I load the article. That image adds precisely zero information, but bulks up the page load by 702,043 bytes and several seconds even on broadband. Fucking stop already.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
"The practical benefit of saying an awful lot without having to turn your slightly inarticulate thoughts into an articulate email is obvious"
No it isn't. It's the same bullshit justification for meetings that go on far too long. I had a manager who was a big fan of the broadcast voice mail who would blather on and then send his incoherent rambling to the whole department, wasting everyone's time. I've had other people who hold meetings that have no structure, purpose or actions that result from them. If you want a social hour, meet at the bar after work. If you want to get things done, get them done.
Being an effective communicator takes work and effort. Effective communicators come to the point in a voice mail, organize their emails with the most important information first and run meetings with ruthless efficiency because they respect the time and attention of their audience. A ten minute inarticulate voice mail broadcast to your team is just a waste of everyone's time, as no one is going to grasp your most important points and any necessary actions they might need to take from it.
It takes 10 minutes to listen to a 10 minute message, and it is hard to scan them like you can a 20 page report or email. In an 8 hour day, you have time to listen to 48 such messages. If you have to interact with more than 20 or 30 people (direct reports, peers and people you are managing) they simply can't all be sending you 10 minute voice messages once per day. Also, there is the search problem. Have you ever realized that something important was buried in some email, and you have to search through dozens of keywords to find the right one? Now, imagine doing that with a few hundred voice mail messages.
If I worked for her, I would suggest getting a good speech to text system to transcript and index all of the voice messages - that way you could search for things relevant to you.
I hate phone calls. Hate voice mails almost as much. When I'm working, the verbal part of my brain goes to sleep, and it's a pain in the ass to have to wake it up. Totally breaks my chain of thought. Give me an email any day.
I mean, the only reason I would want to get the "emotion" behind a message is if I find myself unable to comprehend the written word and instead of facts try to "solve" things in an "emotional" way. But even then this is stupid, because to get a reasonable estimation for how somebody feels, you have to be in the same room and talk face-to-face to them.
My take is that this is a protest from people that failed to master the art of the written word. It may be a good idea to disregard any advice they give.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There's no decent voicemail search: "which one of these 10,000 voice messages had that information I needed?"
It's a non-starter for the hearing impaired, although the reverse text-to-speech is readily available for visually impaired people who want to hear their messages.
It's a death knell for anyone with the slightest tinge of ADHD, like most engineers (remember: hyperfocus on interesting tasks is the payoff for being unable to pay attention in long meetings).
What you have hear is an audio learner - which it is 100% perfectly OK to be! - having no empathy for others with different learning and communication styles. Again, it's far easier to convert text to speech for those who need it than speech to text for the rest of us.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"Barcelona-based filmmaker Philippa Young, for example, relies on WhatsApp's voice notes to communicate with her nomadic yet tight-knit team of 15. She sends audio notes throughout the day that range from just a few seconds in length to 10 minutes."
Fuck that, if she pestered me with endless voice messages I'd hunt her down and clip out her vocal cords. Fuck you and your voice messages, you self-entitled little shit, some of have things to do besides sitting around and listening to your audio laundry list of blather.
Seriously, I'd quit if my boss started doing this kind of crap. EMAIL EXISTS, USE IT.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Indeed. Technology cannot fix stupid.
The idea that technology can fix stupid crops up frequently though (no surprise, there are a lot of stupid people that really want it to):
- Programming languages. No, if you cannot code worth shit in one language, another one will not fix that.
- Operating systems: If you are a luser in one OS, you will still be one with a different one. True, some OSes take pains to hide your true skill from you.
- Convenience-food: No, that magic deep-frozen package will not make you appear to be an expert chef.
- Personal style: No matter how "high-tech", or expensive or "Channel" things are, if you do not have style the only fix is to let somebody else dress you.
- Games: No, that aim-bot or other cheating-software will not make you superior. It will just make you look utterly pathetic.
- Driving: No amount of high-tech will turn you into a good driver. Exception: The fully self-driving car.
And so on.
Idiots are a fact of life. The problem starts when they refuse to accept what they are.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well I guess this is correct: "the fear that emails, texts and instant messaging rob conversation of emotional nuance, leading to endless misunderstandings and social blunders." But a bigger fear for me is engaging in verbal communication which absolutely leads to endless misunderstanding and social blunders. Verbal communication can't be endlessly revised to convey actual meaning without sounding like a jarring mess or having to reencode the entire message.
Maybe there are other ways that we can address this problem?
For example, could we apply technology to help moderate over-use of email? Here are some things that we could try, if the problem were that bad...
1. Interval Between Send... You know how some authentication mechanisms have a brute-force defence mechanism that introduces a longer and longer interval between repeat attempts at a password? Suppose your email client could detect the frequency with which a user sent an email, then used that to introduce intervals if emails were sent too frequently?
2. Points Based System... Suppose every email you sent got a score based on things like the number of recipients, the number of words and/or the number of attachments. First, you could impose enforced delays as above; in the alternative you could produce a league table, showing your organisation who your worst offenders were...
3. The Charity Donation... You know how some companies/places have a "swear jar" for anyone using profanity in the office? How about having one that charges one penny, one cent, one {whatever} base unit of currency per email. At the end of the month a report is produced and people pay the amount to a charity of their choice, delivered by the organisation...
4. House Rules... Maybe something as simple as "Don't send emails before 10:00 or after 15:00 [local time]..." to give people a break in their day when they can catch up on either reading emails, or getting actual work done.
5. Numpty Awards... Do you have people who believe that they need to "cc the world" with every email? Maybe you could have a prize for "the most over-cc'd email"... Just this one thing should reduce the amount of email you get by 50%...
A few dozen emails per day, probably not a problem. Many dozens, or hundreds, of emails per day, somewhat overwhelming.
The question is what's the nature of the problem? Email, in and of itself, is not the problem. It's the number of emails. Are you giving your email address to anyone who asks? I'm amazed at the number of retailers who ask for my email address. Maybe we don't need to give out email addresses like candy.
Beyond that, some people seem to love to spend a lot of their time sending out pointless emails. Maybe we need to set up filters to direct their emails to a separate folder that we skim over, say, once a week. Half, to three quarters, of the emails I receive at work are unnecessary and contribute nothing at all to my work - they typically get deleted post haste.
linquendum tondere
I once worked in a tech company that employed a large overseas staff. The requests I would get involved large lists of IP addresses, port numbers, and host names. The host names were never anything you could even pronounce. They looked like random alpha-numerics due to names being dictated by a formula. For some reason, my peers from India always insisted on making a phone call, instead of just putting the request into an email from which I could copy/paste the names/IPs/ports into the queries and commands I needed to execute the request.
It got so bad that I just stopped answering my phone, and let every call go to vmail. Then I would check the vmail periodically, and email the senders, telling them to put the request into an email. Sometimes they would email back that they really needed to *talk* on the phone. So I would call them back and they would attempt to rattle off the initial vmail over again. And I would interrupt them to explain that I do not take dictation; If they want the request done, they need to put it in an email.
If it works for the film maker it is only because few people will actually use this method. It is painful enough that only subordinates and those who absolutely must communicate with the film maker will hassle with listening to or sending voice memos. She is not overwhelmed because less is getting communicated.
I've had co-workers do that: require that communication with them only take place through some obscure channel that only they like to use. It cuts down the cruft all right. If you make it painful enough to communicate with you, people will not communicate when it is not important. Unfortunately, it also means you often don't get informed when it *is* important.
My kids' school does this. Instead of sending me an email, they send these $DIETY-awful voice mails that drone on, mostly about things that don't affect me at all, for 3 minutes. At least that's what they were a couple years ago. I couldn't tell you what's in one now since they're all deleted unheard.
Even worse, they've started sending emails, too. That'd be great if the emails actually included the text, but no, they're the stupidest of all possible alternatives. They just include a link to the audio.
Bastards.
Then you use a phone (yours or someone else)
A phone produces voicemail, and I thought nehumanuscrede and Karl Cocknozzle were specifically discussing avoiding voicemail.
or those handy gaming cafes or a number of other community computers.
Karl Cocknozzle mentioned "employees". Using a gaming cafe would require leaving the office and hoping that the IT department's trouble ticket system is even reachable from a non-company network.
Flawed solution: - can't scan for important pieces - no fast forward ... but most of all: if you have an international team that communicates in English as the second (or third, fourth) language it is, paired with line quality, almost in-comprehensive to decipher. Chinglish, Singlish, Gerlish, Thailish.... just to name a few.
Seriously, how can anyone work productively with such a system? And frankly, what do these people's mailboxes look like? I receive about 100 mails a day, sans spam. Of those, ~70 are automated reports and simply get filed away by filters, 15 are digests from forums or mailing lists that I glance over if I have the time and the inclination, and the remaining 15 I actually have to read. Of those, ten are one- or two-liners, mostly of an informative nature, and five might actually have more than one paragraph and require a close reading.
For me Young's way of communicating comes off primarily as a way to offload work onto her subordinates: Figures for speed of production and reception of communication in different media led me to that conclusion. Typing on a physical keyboard is well below 40 words/minute for most people; since she mentioned WhatsApp I assume she is communicating primarily via a mobile device, where typing rates are even lower. Speaking, on the other hand, can go up to 200 words per minute (especially in a language like Spanish, which I assume she uses, that lends itself well to rapid speech). The recipient, on the other hand, loses the very powerful ability to skim. You don't know if you can skip a portion of audio unless you heard it, in most cases. Reading works vastly differently.
And her very first quote sums up why this idea is significantly flawed for professional communication:
The article goes on to quote personal communication and the conveyance of emotion as supportive arguments. Yes, I do prefer voice or video when talking to my fiancé or my sister – because the person matters as much as or even more than the content, and time there is not a scarce resource divided between several activities that all have to come together for me to get any work done but something I willingly set aside. But frankly, virtually all of my personal digital communication has long moved to messengers like WhatsApp and Threema. I can count the truly personal mails I receive each year on one hand.
I have been gently nudging the institute where I work towards more formal and more permanent forms of communication, precisely because of the drawbacks of this 'slightly inarticulate' nature of speech.
And, in general, there is nothing that I hate as much as pre-recorded voice messages. I have fought my mobile provider tooth and nail to get their oh so helpful super-duper voice mail box ("It's digital! And there's an app for downloading your messages! And it's digital!") disabled. Call me, or text me. Or GTFO.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
I didn't quite catch that. Sorry.
Smartphones are also far more expensive per month to operate than dumbphones.
How does it handle "international" accents?
Probably varies by service. There are services that will have a human transcribe the email if it is a particular problem. If someone has to work on the phone a lot that might be a worthwhile investment.
It depends on how it's written. On a phone, you might be right. But on a computer with a full-size (or nearly so) keyboard, 80 wpm is more than possible. Anyone who routinely gets the "Slow Down Cowboy!" error message on Slashdot can attest to this.
Most people can talk at 110-150 wpm. My wife is an MD and she also is a fast typist (>100wpm). In most cases it is faster for her to use a transcription service than to type it herself. Most people can talk significantly faster than they can type and that even includes those proficient with a keyboard. On a phone it's no contest at all. Not to mention that lugging around a full sized keyboard everywhere you go is more than slightly inconvenient.
Am I doing something wrong by paying only $90 per year for service my dumbphone on Virgin Mobile? Or am I doing something wrong by assuming that voice and data service on a smartphone would run me $400 per year?
Have you forgotten?
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Have you forgotten? [You can use a smartphone on AT&T with no data plan by buying the GoPhone SIM separately and activating it online.]
Except in this case (reporting a dead computer on a corporate network without using voice), you'd actually need the data plan if the network doesn't allow BYOD. You'd also need a data plan to report an outage of the corporate network.
[You can use a smartphone on AT&T with no data plan by buying the GoPhone SIM separately and activating it online.]
Or buy a retail phone package, or bring over a sim from a feature phone.
From the legal department: Don't leave a voicemail. It is more likely you will say something stupid that subjects the company to liability. If something went wrong, call someone and talk about it. Don't write it down and certainly don't leave a voicemail about it. Cheers.
I prefer email *because* of the lack of intimacy of the human voice.
If you're actually at a company, then you get your officemate's/neighbor to do it for you, unless you really are the only person with a computer at the company with a computerized support system.