Farhad Manjoo at Slate makes a good point: voicemail, the clunky old process of “pressing 1 to play, 9 to delete,” is dead. Transcription services like Google Voice and Spinvox have made the process of getting messages from your phone in audio format obsolete. And good riddance.
The bill of particulars is damning. Unlike your e-mail inbox, voice mail is impossible to skim: If your phone tells you that you’ve got five new messages, you’ve got no choice but to listen to at least a bit of each one before you can decide what to do with it. In a user-interface decision that I suspect might violate some subclause of the Geneva Conventions, your voice-mail system insists on making you listen to the same instructional prompts between each message.
I haven’t listened to a voicemail in years now, instead using various third party systems for transcription. I’ve even disabled visual voicemail on the iPhone mostly because it still requires a few seconds of listening. I’d much rather get a poorly transcribed voicemail message (”hey john this is kevin ray from you start sorry to bug you again on the phone minutes away”) and get the gist of the conversation awaiting me than wait for a message from a warranty renewal service to pop up like a whack-a-mole. So goodbye, voicemail. Go. Go now.
Techcrunch says RSS is dead. CrunchGear says voicemail is dead. I think you all need to tone it down a bit… these are two completely ridiculous claims. Anyone with sentiment – you know the type of people that still like to hear their own mother/father/sister/brother/friend/wife/children’s voice – knows that voicemail isn’t going anywhere… ever.
I agree. “Possibly on the decline” might have been a better statement.
I still get voicemails and will listen to them, because they’re often important. But I’m also looking forward to Google Voice and I’ve also used You Mail to screen voicemail.
My company provides professionally recorded male & female English, Spanish and French Canadian voice prompts for voicemail… not only the “Press 7 to Delete” prompts but also the “Thank you for Calling Dominos Pizza. Press 1 to place your order or stay on the line to hear our specials.” kinda prompts. I can assure you voicemail is alive and well… so… “Thanks for listening… and have a nice day. Good bye.”
If voicemail is dead, how would any messages get transcribed–semantics eh. Funny, if VM were always txt, we’d improve it to also be voice and make the same ludicrous statements.
They’ve opened more options for interacting w/ VM, that is all. Which way is more effective depends on the situation.
I agree that voicemail is dead in fact I wrote about this in detail almost a year ago now. You can read what I wrote at the VoxSciences web site: http://www.voxsci.com/cms/showPage?PAGE=deathofvoicemail.tml
Voice communication is dead. Its all about the QWERTY and T9Word. Soon no one will remember how to use our vocal cords and we will all be stuck transcribing our thoughts via the internet and text messages, or rather “net and txt msgs” since that is much faster than typing out the entire word. Voice is dead!
If only Voicemail weren’t so prevalent in the US. Europeans do fine with just voice and text messages. Ah, if only the telecom companies weren’t so incompetent.
Voice mail isn’t dead it just needs an upgrade. Just like CGr said transcribed messages rely on voice mail. New technology will come along and it will evolve to meet today’s demands. that’s how technology works.
Now a days we have great technology like proxy networks that allow people to access their computers remotely and voice mail just needs to catch up.
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