With Google Voice, Say Goodbye to Voicemail Once and for All
By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Great post recently by Farhad Manjoo on Slate.com predicting the coming demise of voicemail:
Every new way we develop of talking to one another—e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging, Twitter, etc.—is faster and more useful than leaving an audio message on someone's phone. That's why, according to cell phone companies, lots of people only rarely dial in to their messages, and some of us have stopped checking entirely. It won't be long till we're all in that camp; the end of voice mail is nigh, and it won't be missed.
Manjoo lists all the ways voicemail has become increasingly obsolete, and extols the virtues of Google Voice, which transcribes voicemail messages into E-mail text. Personally, I find texting my friends on their cellphones to be easier than leaving voicemail at their houses.
I say good riddance to voicemail. Readers, let me know what you think. But when you do, don't leave me a voicemail. I never check it.
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Tags: technology | Google | text messaging
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Reader Comments
We may hate it but..
About 400 billion voicemail messages are left every year. Turning them into text and interfacing them into other messaging mediums such as SMS or Email or IM seems like a brilliant solution.
Voicemail is not dead , its just being brought into the 21st century.
Still Useful for Some Things
I have two sons off in college. They rarely answer their cell phones, so I leave them messages. The primary topic of our communications is usually the transfer of money from me to them. So checking their voice mail may be a hassle, but they seem motivated to do so.
Voice Mail Is becoming Nothing But A Caller Interface
Having been involved in the early days of voice messaging before any form of online text messaging, voice mail was a practical solution for failed telephone call attempts, i.e., telephone answering. Today, even synchronous phone calls are not really needed, when flexible messaging alternatives are available.
So, with new capabilities like telephony presence/availability information and voice-to-text messaging services, voice mail is really transitioning to a contact initiator (caller) interface option for sending a person-to-person message via speech, rather than typing text. The message recipient has the same kind of flexible options to listen to a text message when in a hands-free, eyes-free (mobile) situation.
The biggest benefit to both the contact intiator and recipient/respondent from the new flexibility of messaging in a unified communications (UC) environment, is that users can communicate independently of each other's prefernces, and we won't have to transcribe important information from a voice message any more.
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