Let's review the recent history of human communication:
1876-2000: Telephones provide convenient and universal voice communication.
2000-2023: Thekidsthesedays decide they hate telephones and really, really hate voice messages, so instead they use phone infrastructure to send text messages.
Today: Kids realize that emojis don't actually represent the full range of human emotion, so they begin using text infrastructure to send voice messages.
2024-2025: New startup devises way to translate voice messages into specially notated text that passes along emotional cues.
2025: Even newer startup uses advanced AI to translate notated text into a better version of the voice message the sender would have sent if they'd been smarter.
2026: Old-school telephone calls make a comeback, but are mediated by AI so that everyone speaks and sounds better than they would in real life. Kids need only speak a few words for the AI to figure out what they were about to say and just say it for them.
Hold on. What's this about voice messages?
Maybe you’ve noticed: Lately, they’re popping up in more group chats and one-on-one conversations. 62 percent of Americans say they’ve sent a voice message, and around 30 percent communicate this way weekly, daily, or multiple times a day.
Some are even communicating more with voice messages than texts....“I use voice messages every single day,” Kennedy Dierks, a 21-year-old student at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, told me. “I find it to be a lot more personal than a text.”
Dierks said voice messages have exploded in popularity on her college campus in the past year. As an example, she said she recently used the feature to give a friend the rundown about a date she’d just gone on, because it was easier to “hash it out” than via text. More broadly, voice memos are popular because they allow people to share the richness that comes with voice communication, like tone, mood, and humor — without the pressure of inconveniencing someone with a phone call.
Everything old is new again. Everything new is also new again. Oh, and everything new is old again. The only constant is that, one way or another, h. sapiens is built to gossip and will do so no matter the obstacles.
Haha. Personally I love that now IPhone translates voice mail to text. A fine feature that allows to not listen to voice messages.
Time is a flat circle.
A good voice-to-text capability that added emotional cues could be really useful and supplant the traditional court "recorder" (a person who takes down every word using some type of shorthand machine.) Sure, we can record sounds and conversations, but can we search efficiently? Skim? This is where text still has its uses.
Some folks even regard text communications as some kind of "art form." Bizarre.
Anyone who sends me a voice message is an a-hole. Please text, email, or call me. I don't want to listen to your disconnected stream of consciousness voicemail by another name.
the big upside of text vs voice calls for me was asynchonicity. I can send a message and the other party does not have to immediately answer or respond, and vice versa for me getting a text. The downside was typing a long text for a nuanced conversation on a phone remains a pain, and text to speech still isn't quite perfect (at least last time i checked which may no longer be true). But short voice messages give the same asynchronicity plus the ease and nuance of a voice call. I still don't use them, because I also like the brevity text enforces, but in that i'm probably an outlier.
I'll piggy-back and say that for me the speed differential between talking and reading makes this a desirable feature. In fact, that's why I stopped watching broadcast/cable news programs; they did a good job of delivering the tiniest amounts of information as slowly as possible.
This is why when I want to know how to do something, I skip all the videos Google serves up.
The interface for a voice message in SMS chat thread is miles better than dialing into some voicemail system and trying to either listen to every damn message one at a time or trying to navigate through them with no visual queues.
That said I still hate voice messages.
Do something useful.
Use AI to translate dog.
I saw a good cartoon of that. All the dogs had speech bubbles above them with varying numbers and intensities of the word "Hey!"
"h. sapiens is built to gossip and will do so no matter the obstacles"
Yep, why I recall that back in the 1960s some people used faxes (capable of multiple send-to addresses) as a form of limited circulation email. Many even kept a fax machine next to their bed for maximum convenience both sending and receiving.
It appears to me from long experience that human females are considerably more adept at speech than are human males. The gals clearly invented it. I have in the past said often, "Women invented speech in order to order us (men) around."
But this is a new dimension. Perhaps their motivation was two-fold. Yes, they certainly want to boss us around, but then they want to crow about it to other women. And then slag us.
Makes a TON of sense.
McLuhan described this process of new media amplifying a new perspective, obsolescing the old media, retrieving another aspect from the past, and then replicating the old media in The Global Village. Texting retrieved and replicated telegraphic communication in form and style. An apparent example.
Yes, Kevin missed an opportunity above by not starting with the telegraph at least. Messengers on horseback, with either voicemail or text messages, could have been prepended as well.
Smart phones obsolesced the once ubiquitous answering machine. Now users have rediscovered voice mail.