
Think Before You Voicemail - markbao
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/05/think-before-you-voicemail/
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meredydd
Agreed, entirely. The big problem with voicemail as a medium is that it takes
so long to read. Not to mention lack of indexability, near-impossibility of
seeking accurately...

...So remind me, again, why we're getting so excited about video comments on
blogs, or sending audio clips instead of emails? It's like, after a few years
with a high-productivity medium (rapidly-delivered text), some people have
just completely un-learned so much of what it taught us.

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alexk
So true, I worked in telecom industry on the voice mail servers and the irony
was that I never used the services that developed. From my point of view the
biggest problem with voice interface - it's too heavy, it takes too much time
to navigate all these voice menu's listen to the message from start and the
inability to filter and manipulate the information. Voicemail is dead. At
least in the form that we have now.

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petercooper
E-mail is not reliable enough to be a one-stop medium (as an alternative to
voicemail - as highlighted in the post). I love e-mail as a medium, but I
never know for certain (or even with just an 80% probability) whether a
message I send will get through. Thanks to spam, many bounce / "message
undelivered" type messages are never sent back, and mails disappear into the
ether.

At least the phone / voicemail are reasonably guaranteed. Voicemails stay
where they should and phone calls are instantly verifiable. E-mails are not,
and you cannot /entirely/ rely on them at any point.

E-mail as a conceptual medium is great, but its delivery mechanism sucks for
anyone who needs reliable communications with the rest of the world.

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tx
Exactly! When I moved to US in 98 I was shocked at how popular voice mail was
and it was annoying even then. Yep, voicemail and faxes - two things from
common everyday US technologies I could never grasp.

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jodrellblank
The world is just waiting for Fax-to-Voicemail.

Just play the faxmail recording into your fax machine to get a convenient
printout of the message!

Like an email you can skim read the text, like a phonecall you can be sure it
arrived. The best of both worlds!

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ivankirigin
The iphone has solved this problem for me - at least for incoming messages. I
would like a transcription too.

As these tools become more common, it will become easier to receive the
information. That means Arrington is essentially wrong: you can continue to
use voicemail and people will be more likely to get the message as time goes
on. That isn't 'dead'. 'Comatose' might have been a better choice of words.

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markbao
An interesting startup in the market of voice message transcription to text is
PhoneTag (<http://www.phonetag.com/>) which was formerly Simulscribe.

