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The Voicemail Vex

Posted by in iPhone, Technology, Telephone


A lot of people, it seems, have had it with voicemail.

The Slate’s Farhad Manjoo refers to voicemail as an “absurdly backward mode of human-computer interaction” and prefers services like Google Voice, which take those voice messages and automatically transcribe them to text that can be quickly delivered by email or text message.

Well, that may be fine for Manjoo, but not me.  Maybe I’m a little absurdly backward when it comes to high-tech interaction these days, but I actually like voicemail.  I like hearing a human voice once in a while.  Especially since most of the my closest friends don’t live in the same place I do, and so the best I can do is talk on the phone once in a while.

When one of us can’t catch the other on the phone, it’s nice to be able to hear their voice.

I don’t mean to knock text messages; some of my friends do the text message thing, too, and I don’t mind that.  But for me, nothing beats hearing the voice of someone you really care about, even if it’s a quick hello and “Sorry I missed you.”

Before I switched to the iPhone, I actually tried a service that transcribes voice messages and displays them on your phone.  It worked about two-thirds of the time.  Sound recognition technology has lots of trouble with proper names and accents can really throw the computer for a loop.  Then there’s that same old problem with reading comments online: without hearing the inflection and the tone of the voice, it’s sometimes hard to get the full meaning of the message leading to easy misinterpretations.

I’ll take my messages the absurdly backward way, thanks.