Voicemail is dead
Voice mail is dead. Please tell the whole world so it will stop using it.
When I started in the real world in the mid-nineties voice mail is an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various systems of enterprise voice – which took the best group and forwarding messages, allowing for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Despite e-mail was around, people still doubt how to use it. Letters iban a letterhead and formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email label is still being developed. It’s good for the mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, PowerPoint files and everything, but took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out in the workplace or arrived with the program.
It takes much longer to hear a message that read it. And voice mail is usually beyond our typical workflow, so it is difficult to forward or reply with ease.
Typical voicemail messages today are things like "Please do not leave me a voice message, rarely listen to them. Please email me at xxxx@xxxx.com" Many people do not bother in creating his voice mail in all accounts. Then there is my favorite method, which I personally use – let the message box full and then not be empty. Caller ID still tells me he called, and I simply call them back.
How many times have you called someone back and said: "I saw that you called, but not even listen to the voice, Is it something urgent?"
Senders often feel guilty for leaving voice messages, too. And to ensure that you receive the message, very often people will contact a text message – "I just left a virtual machine, it is important" – just so you know it’s there.
Some companies that are trying to do more useful voice. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voice mail feature helps clean up the mess, too. But at the end of the day, you still need to take time to listen to the voice messages, and that usually comes after other equally urgent tasks but less disruptive.
The services that really make it more usable voice are those that convert text into voice and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag Yap and Jotto, for example).
More are offering mobile conversion of text per month or pay per message. It’s my guess that this will become increasingly common. The voice is here to stay as a method of data entry, but listening to the messages undoubtedly become increasingly a luxury to be reserved for loved ones or messages that are not transcribed in the same (or what need to hear the tone or emotion).
By now most people have no voice transcription services. So think before a voice message, more and more people seem annoying.
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