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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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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...
"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, ..."
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.
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.
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.
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.