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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.