'Only Voice Memos Can Save Us From the Scourge of Email' (qz.com) 290
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."
So glad I don't work with her (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds bloody annoying.
Re:So glad I don't work with her (Score:5, Interesting)
Trying to decide if I'd ignore all her voice mails because I don't have time to listen to everything she said and can't scan for important things, or I'd ignore her voice mails because clearly she is full of bad ideas.
Probably both. If anyone sent me an email that took 10 minutes to read, I would ignore it after glancing.
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If I want voice, I'll just call and talk on the phone real time.
For work, I actually HATE IM....I'm happy that mine for some reason doesn't seem to work well, but even when it does, I am either usually signed out or appear away.
I can't get a damned thing done with IM on....as that someone is constantly trying to chat with you to ask this or that.....I can never keep a train of thought or concentrate.
I like email..it is asynchronous, and allows me to read and reply as I get time on my work schedule.
Re:So glad I don't work with her (Score:4, Interesting)
Or, heaven forbid, use voice mail/answering machines that have been around for decades. I routinely ignore my phone when I'm busy, and everyone who knows me knows that they can immediately call a second time if it's important to talk to me right now. As for everyone else - if they can't be bothered to wait through my (very brief) answering message to leave a message, then it's a safe bet that whatever they had to say wasn't actually important enough for me to waste time listening to. As an added bonus, most people don't like talking to machines, and will impart the relevant information in a fraction of the time it would take to extract it from them in a conversation.
Still, for some things it would be nice to be able to conveniently bypass the phone call entirely and jump straight to voice mail - there are times the intimacy and subtlety of voice are preferable, but that doesn't mean I want to interrupt your flow, nor waste a bunch of time on irrelevant conversational pleasantries.
Best case I think would be auto-dictation with voice attachment, so that you could send a voicemail, with all the convenience of recording such, and have it automatically (and accurately) converted to text so that it can be read in a fraction of the time, with the original recording available to listen to as well, if *you* judge that the subtlety or intimacy are important.
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You want to annoy my 16-year old? Call on the phone.
I'm 38 and phone calls annoy me too. Doubly so when you expect me to remember the conversation 2 weeks from now. If you'd sent an email I could have at least looked it up again.
Re:So glad I don't work with her (Score:4, Interesting)
What takes 10 minutes to say in voicemail can probably be read in 1 or so, and more easily referred back to.
My employer started doing video documentation instead of written documentation for in-house tools and classes and it's extremely irritating - it's a population of very well educated people who are used to reading large volumes of technical information for detail and digesting it, so they started distributing information in the lowest bandwidth, least random-access way they could think of.
Re:So glad I don't work with her (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just your company. This is a trend on the internet too. It used to be you could google for a term and get a list of steps to do. Now you get a 30 minute video (subscribe please!) with a lot of fluff and chat.
Dry technical manuals have their place, and they're very useful at what they do. But you don't normally read them cover to cover.
crap shilling article is crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Worse, said boss will then claim that every self-contradictory thing said in among all the hemming and hawing is necessary and required. Such people don't actually listen to themselves speak, so they don't even notice when they contradict themselves and fail to clarify which contradictory instruction actually holds. They certainly don't clarify it to themselves.
No, no voicemail.
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I really don't think that's true. A well-written guide, with clear and well-chosen screen-shots, is more valuable than a video every single time
Not every single time. There's a few things out there where video really is best.
I learned how to make a few origami pieces from youtube videos that I'd tried repeatedly over the years to figure out from multiple books. All those arrows and folds and pointers suddenly made sense, but only after seeing someone actually do it.
There's a few other things too.
Especially for software tutorials, not least because it's extremely difficult to cut & paste from a video.
Again, there's a few things that you really just need to *see*; some critical step omitted that is obvious once you know about it. Some of the stuff in gim
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I do see your point. However, I think a well-written guide is superior to a video, no matter how good that video is. And I think that this is true always.
This is because:
a) You do not have to bother to pause a written guide.
b) You can print out a guide, and use it for reference later.
c) You can cut & paste from text - very important for software.
d) A guide can, in a pinch, be automatically translated.
e) It is far far easier to refer back to a particular point in a guide, than it is to find a partic
Re:So glad I don't work with her (Score:5, Insightful)
Voice memos do not solve spam or email volume issues, instead it will massively excaberate those issues. And I bet we will have the added joy of having to listen to other people's voicemail again, like in the bad old days.
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Truly in this case the cure is worse than the disease.
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I agree, I don't have a problem with a huge email flow.
Only time I have a huge unread inbox is when I have had some extended vacation.
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Only time I have a huge unread inbox is when I have had some extended vacation.
Even then, it's no problem. Select all, mark all as read. Email to group: if anyone sent me anything critical while I was out that still needs my attention, resend it.
Voicemail, The Vinyl Records of Communication (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:Voicemail, The Vinyl Records of Communication (Score:4)
Agreed wholeheartedly. I do not want to go through spam at a rate of 30 seconds each listening to (no doubt) bad voice synthesizers telling me about woodworking plans, free vacations, desperate Russian girls, etc, etc. Nor do I want to listen to even legitimate messages where someone stammers for 5 minutes to convey 3 lines of text worth of information.
I deliberately never configured the voicemail on my cell. Most people who call when I'm not there to answer are on a cell themselves, they can text or email and I'll call back.
If voice is really that important to convey something, record it and attach it to (wait for it!) an email!
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Most people who call when I'm not there to answer are on a cell themselves, they can text or email and I'll call back.
Are they just "on a cell" or particularly on a smartphone? Because flip phones like my Audiovox 8610 don't do email, and a text is laborious to compose with T9 and switching to multitap for unknown words. Or is a cell phone that doesn't cost $400 a year to run also "ancient hipster technology"?
Re:So glad I don't work with her (Score:5, Funny)
No... just.... No... If there was ever an apt time to use the Billy Madison quote, this is it....
"... [W]hat you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
Oh Gawd no (Score:3)
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
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Where I work I have to deal with Japanese-English, Indian-English, French-English, Spanish-English, Swedish-English and American-English, sometimes in the same meeting - over phone.
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Then you haven't heard some Indian dudes.
Not only pronunciation but also grammar completely out of sequence.
Reading is faster (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Reading is faster (Score:4, Insightful)
you can read faster than you can listen to someone talking
And you can process it even faster, by non-sequentially jumping your attention to the meat of the matter. I'd estimate you can process AT LEAST ten short text or email messages in the time it takes to handle one. That's an entire order of magnitude. For many people and situations it will be far more.
There are a number of other problems, but this alone kills the idea (except, perhaps, for a few special - and small - groups and situations where some other advantage, such as a key member who doesn't do process text well or when voice side-channel information (such as emotional state) are key).
Think about it: A company using voice rather than text messages might need ten times as many people to do the same work. Try that in a competitive market and see how long your company survives.
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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?
Maybe it's not about our reading speed.
I suspect the reason she likes the voicemail so much is that she types like 3 words a minute using one finger.
Some time ago I had clumsily managed to burn most of my fingertips so typing was painful. I wrote messages by mostly doing copy-n-paste from other messages.
90% all messages are the some old shit anyway, which is why you can decode an email in less than a second.
One disability for another (Score:2)
I suspect the reason she likes the voicemail so much is that she types like 3 words a minute using one finger.
But if you switch to voicemail, you're shutting out the deaf coworker. So how can both mobility disabilities and hearing disabilities be accommodated?
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Isn't that why people swarmed to email in the first place? Precisely because it's more efficient for most communications than phone calls?
I hate talking on the phone. Especially to people who can't speak in complete sentences. Subject, verb, object. It's not fucking rocket science.
Hell No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Hell No (Score:4, Insightful)
"Ymmm. Hmm. Oh. Hey, Steve - remember that thing we talked about the other day? Umm, the uh, widget interface that looks like a squiggle with projectile vomiting? Well, uhm, uh, wait, no it was the one that looked like Justin Beiber. Or something like that.
Well, anyway, what I wanted to say it that, I think and Mary thinks to and, ummm."
Spare me. I'll take less emotional baggage any day. I'm justl getting to the point where emojis don't give me the shakes.
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At least when it's on the computer, it can be sent to voice-to-text and then a spam filter :-)
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No, not that. Have you seen what happens when the speaker has an accent?
Re:Hell No (Score:5, Funny)
To be fair, the person advocating this was a filmmaker, I can't think of an industry that more enjoys listening to the sounds of their own voice.
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Now what would be really cool is if there was some voice to text interface that maybe made each sentence clickable or something and could start playing the audio from that point.
Re:Hell No (Score:4, Insightful)
Na gut betrayed. Ring voice to text is the best. Can't wait for it. Antrieb Ebay popel.
*** actual voice to text conversion of my reply to you using Google android.
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The obvious solution is voice to text
That seams light it cold leap to problems; butt eye don't no why.
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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.
Judging by her Instagram posts (and dear god, the filters. No wonder I never got into Instagram) she's in her 20's. Speaking as someone just a few months shy of 30 (and therefore tragically labelled as part of the unfortunate "millennial" generation) people in that current age group seem to have a pressing need to (re)discover/(re)invent fashions, ideas, and technology that we have long since moved past. Handlebar mustaches, filters giving photos an aged/vintage look, ditching email for what is essential
Voice Memo huh (Score:5, Funny)
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. . . . .
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Or rambling voice messages that suck minutes out of your life. I can dismiss an email in 2-5 seconds, I cannot do this with voice messages.
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you're* ;-)
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you're
It was voicemail. How can you tell which form they used?
Victor Borge, where are you when we needed you?
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As a policy, when I was on the helpdesk, I would log those messages into tickets titled "garbled voice-mail" and not call back on principle. Sorry, no, we can't help you if you can't be bothered to learn basic telephone manners at the age of 35. Thankfully, now almost every company allows employees to submit tickets online, so I'm sure we've totally "Solved" one problem by shunting the idiots who can't leave a voice-mail that is understandable to human ears onto a web-app where they religious leave every fi
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Or even worse, if it is someone with a thick indian accent, trying to speak english from a speaker phone or cheap headset....ugh. Live meetings trying to understand that are bad enough, please don't open us up to even more exposure than that....
I try to get text or
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That's far better (in that it wastes less of your time) than
"Hi, it's, um, I need you to, there's this thing that's not working, er, can you help, look, I really need, my computer, you know, . . ." for about 20 minutes, with not one complete sentence in it.
voicereply (Score:2)
haveyoutriedturningitoffandonagain
I leave voice farts (Score:2, Funny)
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.
No way. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I couldn't agree more--the trend where every fucking web-page needs an accompanying video (that MUST autoplay! ...or we won't get enough views!) is extremely annoying to anyone with reading and reading comprehension skills beyond the second grade. For us, the ability to read something (or scan it) faster than some dope can dictate the same information becomes a massive, world-destroying t
Feeling vs Information (Score:5, Informative)
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?"
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I said, PETE
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If voicemail had auto-correct that shouted corrections back at speakers in mid-sentence, or buzzed every time they mispronounced a word, or made a rapid finger-drumming noise every time they said "um..." -- well, I might actually start encouraging people to leave me voicemail again.
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It might brighten the work day if you get a message from the PHB: "Johnson! Get me a neer, my feet boils smell. I'm fucking a cow, can't you hear me farting?"
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Since 'everyone knows' that voice is just so much more emotionally rich, they tend to assume that because you got their voicemail you were able to interpret exactly what they were thinking and feeling when they sent it, no matter how poor the quality or patchy the message.
Dangers that people know
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Voice can help you understand the EMOTION behind a person's communication. But text is far better at passing INFORMATION.
My main objection is that I just don't see the situation where you'd want to simply pass the emotion. If I start a conversion like "Hey Dave, I'm a bit concerned about the $foobar interface..." I'd like to know if your response is "Oh? I think it's excellent" or "Yeah, me too" before I go on. If I'm trying to describe something like "I want it to be gloomy" I want to hear some feedback like "So, like sad, melancholic gloomy or creepy, haunted gloomy?" to hear what they understood by it. And if I wanted to s
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This is opposite programmers: we spend our time insulting each other.
Umm... (Score:3)
Use Only as Directed (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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A little discipline saves us from the scourge of emails. Nobody should be getting 100's of emails a day. 20-30 tops. Beyond that you and you are likely a micro-manager who needs to delegate and trust your employees more. Either that or you have some overly chatty people that need to be reminded to keep emails on-point and directed to just the correct recipients.
10 minutes? (Score:2)
Forced listening to the boss' 10 minute diatribe? No thanks.
Give me a transcript instead.
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Just claim that you've deaf and you need everything in text. If they even think about firing you, laying you off, not promoting you, excluding you, etc. you sue, sue, sue.
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Also claim that you've blind and didn't see that you changed "you're deaf" to "you've deaf" but forgot to insert "gone".
Transcription (Score:2)
Forced listening to the boss' 10 minute diatribe? No thanks. Give me a transcript instead.
Agreed but getting a transcript is easier than you might think. I'd stick a screwdriver in my ear before I'd listen to voicemails but I use a voicemail service that transcribes the voicemail for me automatically. I can still listen to it if there is a good reason to but I almost never do. Plenty of services that do this (Google Voice, Youmail, etc). I've been using it for years and it works great.
Honestly I'm kind of surprised that Apple hasn't included something like this in their "visual voicemail".
How many wpm can you type? (Score:2)
I use a voicemail service that transcribes the voicemail for me automatically.
How does it handle "international" [reddit.com] accents?
It's fast to read a message but slow to write one.
It depends on how it's written. On a phone, you might be right. But on a computer with a full-size (or nearly so) keyboard, 80 wpm is more than possible. Anyone who routinely gets the "Slow Down Cowboy!" error message on Slashdot can attest to this.
Depends on how the receiver absorbs the message (Score:2)
For some people, like myself, it can be difficult to understand a recorded message without visual clues and context. Even with visual clues, I prefer to read most content. If my mind skips a cog I can easily reread the previous sentence, but with a voice recording you spend more time trying to go back, landing in the middle of some previous sentence, listen forward to what you were looking for while retaining the context, and then trying to get back into the stream of what was being said.
good luck (Score:2)
NO NO NO! NO! (Score:2)
We already have this scourge which I couldn't manage to disable in Whatsapp. Instead of just getting a text that would comfortably fit in a line on a mobile, never mind a ~160-character SMS I have to scramble to get some headphones, download the audio and listen for two minutes (that feel like two days) for something like "hi, what's up, errr, hhmmmm, hi, please do that" or "you forgot that".
NOOOOOOO (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll keep my "intimacy" for my personal partners and not my work colleagues.
Heck, emails are often too long. That's why most of us communicate by text. I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
Voicemails!!!
Email and vmail both suck (Score:2)
Why can't we just switch to instant messaging for everything?
Gawd no (Score:2)
...She sends audio notes throughout the day that range from just a few seconds in length to 10 minutes...
That sounds 100 times worse than emails. At least with emails I can skim them, how do I escape someone droning on and on and on for 10 minutes?
Searchable and indexable (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Searchable and indexable (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that I've taken the time to skim read the article, its even worse than I thought.
"The practical benefit of saying an awful lot without having to turn your slightly inarticulate thoughts into an articulate email is obvious"
No its not. Just no. I'd love to hear the un-edited opinions of her employees.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. (Score:2)
Now some brilliant specimen is patting themselves on the back for reinventing voicemail on top of a new platform? It beats paying international calling rates to your local telco racket and suffering voicemail, I suppose; but that's damning by very, very, faint praise.
Sigh (Score:2)
- Can't search.
- Can't necessarily even understand (if the audio is muffled, no message at all).
- Require audio equipment (can't listen in a meeting, for example - I'm often involved in meetings where we email out for a quick answer and get it back live while we're making a decision).
- Much larger data storage. My email is already Gigs, but at least I can keep them all on my phone.
- No advantage. Email is deliberately formal to hide the emotional shit and cut to the facts. We need this done, for this rea
Din (Score:2)
We have cubes that let sounds carry way too well. Often this is helpful to overhear technical discussions that I should eavesdrop on for future reference, or join into to help clear things up. The downside is that talking on the phone, or in this case recording a bunch of voice messages is very intrusive to others who are concentrating, it actually stifles a lot of discussion as we all become very aware that half the team will overheard anything above a whisper.
So unless I have a real office with a door I
Fixing the wrong problem gets you nowhere. (Score:2)
The problem isn't email or voice mail or voice mail called 'voice memos'. It's people, man. It's always been people.
Look, if you're bad at communication - either producing it or receiving it - you're bad at it. Having a smart phone app that you use to take notes during your commute (plus the ambient noise and pauses from distraction) that you send out at 7 pm, expecting your employees to have linked their personal phone to company email and IM services, and ready to listen and respond ... it's not going t
Ugh (Score:2)
No! I can check email almost anywhere. I wouldn't want to check voicemail in most public places, and I don't think the people around would be too thrilled either.
Terrible idea... (Score:2)
Email can be good if... (Score:2)
Mumble mumble WHAT? (Score:2)
Have you ever HEARD some people on the phone?
I'd rather have a nice, simple text message.
Fuck having to try and decipher somebody's accent and dialect on a crappy line from a crappy cell phone someplace in a giant wind tunnel with loads of background noise.
Oh yeah. (Score:5, Funny)
"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, ..."
Great! (Score:2)
This will soon become an additional unambiguous signal that the person attempting to communicate with you CANNOT do so.
No Audio (Score:2)
I'm working in an office environment right now that wouldn't easily permit me to have audio playing. I can put on headphones, but this adds yet another dependency to audio listening, and I wouldn't have a way to reply to communication easily until I left this area, recorded what I needed to say, return to where the wifi is, then send. This sounds like a massive fucking headache. Plus, device dependency becomes a pain in the ass, too. I regularly switch between multiple desktops, laptops, servers, cell phone
Speech to text (Score:2)
Quartz today argues that perhaps voice notes is the best alternative to emails
My phone has this cool new feature that lets me automatically convert Voice notes, and Voicemail in particular, directly to text, and e-mails it to me,
so I can read it in my Inbox. Works great. Highly-recommended. For those annoying times when telemarketers leave voicemail, or some co-worker hasn't learned to e-mail yet.
The distinction being? (Score:2)
Can anyone who has used these apps explain how exactly it differs from voice mail?
Disagree. Disagree! DISAGREE!!! (Score:2)
if (!realtime) { // unassailable truth of the universe
text > voice
}
Here's a better solution (Score:2)
Don't associate people who having nothing to say, but insist on saying it constantly. If your job really requires that you get hundreds of emails a day, odds are, you really should be replaced by a robot. Made out of Legos. With no moving parts.
Um, yeah, ok, about that, ummm, howbout no (Score:4, Insightful)
I fucking hate voice mail.
Searching? (Score:2)
If you get 100 emails per day then you want a damn bloody good and bullet proof way of searching for content when needed. Good luck doing that with voicemail.
Tape storage vs RAM (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
People getting too illiterate for email? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
I can Get-Help -examples to skip directly to syntax examples, and I'm moved on to the next step before I've gotten half-way through a man.
OK, so you get an email from your boss saying "Widget X doesn't work, could you take a look at it".
Imagine even a short voice message read in many different possible tones ranging from the apologetic, via the matter-of-fact to the seething with rage, and I think you'll agree that you could get valuable information that would affect your handling of the matter outside of the literal meaning? And that's even ignoring things like; is the stress on "could", "you", or "look"?
So while I wouldn't want to wish voic
Re: (Score:2)
Tools for sorting audio? Even the 'cloud' ones, where you give up all pretense of privacy in exchange for access to the really fancy tech trained on a huge dataset, are mediocre and error prone; and standalone speech to text tend to be pricey, poorly integrated, and still only accurate for the user it has been trained on.
If your problem is that you are missing t
Re: (Score:2)
You don't actually GIVE your phone number to them, do you?
Re: (Score:2)
You don't actually GIVE your phone number to them, do you?
Are you recommending instead not creating an account with Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo at all? If so, then which email provider should one use in order to continue receiving important mail after changing ISPs?