Not really, I disagree with "not a lot slower". It is much slower and much more frustrating than talking when you have to redraw a word for the fifth time and the keyboard insists on "Chegamiknit" when you want to write "Champagne".
Anyway, it's not an all or nothing thing. Sometimes it's going to be faster, more convenient and appropriate to send an audio message for both parties because tone and articulation convey meaning that text does not. edit: and when you know the other party can act on it. Eg: they can listen and can't talk back but can write back, or the inverse and you have to send them text messages because they can't listen (rushing to catch a metro or to their car) but they can read and they can talk back but can't write fast enough (because rushing to catch a metro or to their car) (yeah, it happened :). So, use when appropriate ?
I also suspect voice messages have different usage across cultures and subcultures and group of peers and the context.
It's also a different way to be with the other person, sharing an audio space. Of course there are limits.
Dont use autocompletion then. You can abreviate or shorten some words too. Champgn and so on.
That just negates the swipe typing argument from parent for text not being much slower than talking.
all apps with voice messages I happened to use support playback through voice speaker, if you put the phone to the ear as if you were just speaking with someone
but I don't really remember how I discovered that and it seems that majority of users don't even know about this feature
With a lot of (cheaper) phones the speaker is also terrible enough that the different modes don't make much of a difference.
Given that many people (including GP and me) prefer document content (not "text" because you can put interactive tools and diagrams in documents, but not text) and it has all of those advantages, it seems like it's pretty clearly the superior medium.
Plus, human brains are notoriously bad at introspection, so I wouldn't be surprised if you don't actually learn faster from videos, and just prefer them because they're e.g. more engaging.
My work has been trying to promote e-learning with ted talk-like videos and I absolutely hate it. It's not just about the speed.
I can learn so much quicker with text. I can skim through the parts I already know and spend more time on the parts I need to carefully consider. With video I need to skip around and it's hard to keep track of what's being discussed then.
I think it's really the younger people in the organisation that ask for it because they're used to youtubes. I rarely watch youtube, probably once a month or so. Makes sense but they try to push it on everyone by setting a goal of so many videos to do.
However even when I was young I thought that classroom teaching was inefficient and I could learn much better myself. One of the problems (also with video) is that you have to slow to the speed of the slowest participant.
I'd be very interested in something like this! Also deal with 3 different languages on a daily basis in different group chats, and many people use voice messages. If you get started I'd for sure contribute to your effort, as having to change from "reading" to "listening" so often really sucks and would save me a lot of time if I could have it transcribed.
Part of the problem is that I'd like to use a service that isn't too privacy invasive. Unfortunately I doubt there is one that's good and doesn't do that :)
I just refuse to listen to any and don't receive them any more.
Yes, there are valid use-cases for one-way voice messages. There just aren't many of those.
This is exactly what I wanted to say in my post, but perfectly phrased and to the point. I'll remember this one if it comes up again, thanks!!
It's definitely a much worse experience for the recipient, I think new social norms of asking first are probably the best solution. I wouldn't ring someone who wasn't expecting a call without asking them if they were free to call first for example, and I think the same should apply to voice messages.
If I can't privately listen right now, I don't, and if they get annoyed, I'll tell them why.
If something would require me to replay it multiple times to take notes, depending on the situation I'll tell the sender to type it up.
It isn't a matter of trying to punish, it is negotiating preferences. Send me something I have to interact with, and it may well take me some time to get to it. This is no different than emailing me a PDF.
True, the latter is definitely a good change. I noticed it in work too, people don't call without asking first. It's really a great norm because you can say "just give me 5 minutes to complete this" when you're concentrating.
Of course it was never a norm before because text messaging didn't exist but it makes sense.
It would be great if people started doing that too for voice messages.
What I still highly dislike are voice messages without prior context or prompt. Eg. just receiving a message out of nowhere, not having any idea what it is about, having to dig around for headphones just to find out, that it says: "hello! how's it going?"
On the other hand, if I ask a person a question that can't be answered in just a sentence, I'm perfectly fine with the other person quickly recording a 1 min voice message instead of having to type it out.
It would seem obvious for the transcription and the sound file to be available to both sender and receiver of the message.
I think so far the sticking point is that message transcription is still hard to do with any accuracy on-device, and if you use a server then you can't claim e2e encryption.
- Text messages require brevity.
- Depending on who you're talking to, Voice messages ramble on and on, without getting to the point. As a result, it can take minutes to understand a main point, rather than seconds as in the case of text message.
Just learned via another comment that playback can apparently be sped up to 1.5x or 2x. That's good, I'll have to look into that.
Voice messages are also useful when writing is not physically viable (ie. while cooking). I even tend to prefer it when I want to develop an idea while delivering the message and have the message development process itself registered as part of what I'm sending.
This should be the norm for everyone.
It correlates with the wealth in a country. An-alphabets will prefer voice chat.
Also, WhatsApp and Signal allow you to play the voice note at faster speeds, like 1.5x.
The problem is as the article mentions. Difficulty searching back, not being able to use Google translate (I'm still learning Spanish), and the time it takes to listen to them. Sending a voice message is faster than typing for the sender but much slower than reading for the recipient which makes it especially annoying in group chats where you end up forcing this extra time on all participants. For this reason I don't think it's very social.
And then there's the issue of listening to them in public, having to dig around for headphones if you don't want to bother your surroundings.
So in general if someone audio messages me I just ignore it until they type their message.
In most languages swipe typing is not a lot slower than talking anyway. And if people really want to talk they can use speech recognition.
I run all my chats through my own matrix server (with bridges) and I was actually thinking of making something that automatically tries to transcribe them. The problem though is that I speak 3 languages :)