Personally, I don’t like them, because of the asymmetry of effort in sending vs receiving, and that you can’t tell how serious it is before listening to it.
I think they’re actually a really easy-to-use and convenient way of someone sending me a message that I’ll never listen to.
I think if someone sends me a voice message I should be allowed to call the police on them.
I don’t know anyone who has ever deliberately pressed the button, every time I receive one it’s a few seconds of silence or rustling followed by an apology text.
A nice feature for people who like it I’m sure, but I’ll text if I want asynchronous communication or just phone someone if I need to speak now.
Voice messages?
I hate those from the bottom of my heart. It’s one of the worst ways to convey information.
TLDR: god awful sound quality and amount of background noise with it mostly being just verbal diarrhea.
Of course there are exceptions.
Same as why I’ve always hated voicemails. Just send me a text.
I occasionally still get messages on my mobile provider’s default voicemail, and honestly by far the biggest issue is the fact that it very slowly reads out the sender’s full number and the exact time of the message before even starting. Without that it would still be bad, but probably 10 times less bad.
Never used them ever.
I love them in certain situations. You can hear if a person sounds genuine or not. Anyone can write a difficult text or copy and send it, but to say something and mean it is a very different thing. Especially if they are responding to somethong and do it fast
They’re for absolute numpties. I knew someone who started using them all the time because it’s hip or something, never listened to them and got him to stop. It takes more effort than typing them and suggests you’re in love with your own voice or speak too much
I do genuinely think that using them is a sign of low intelligence or at least herd following, because you go out of your way to deliberately unlearn/avoid using the device the way it was intended just to bend to the will of big tech tdlling you what to do.
Also i just see speaking randomly into my phone in public as rude to others
Often used by the sender just to send something quick but they are horrible. Now have to find my headset so I can listen to them in private (it’s hard to press play while having it at your ear or you’ll miss the start). Frequently hard to hear what they say. Some just ramble on for ages before getting to the point. I just send back “DNL text me.”
I use AI transcriptions and read them. I feel if the person can’t put effort into writing, they shouldn’t expect me to put effort into listening.
I sometimes send them when I don’t have a better way of communicating (e.g. during a quick stop in the car) but I tend to apologise because I know how much of a ballache they are.
I hate whoever decided this was a good idea on dating profiles. I don’t like making them, I don’t listen to them, and there is nothing sexy or romantic about voicemail.
I feel like this could be easily solved. Just post a transcript under the voice note
The kind of muttering, stammering, and rambling my dad sends me in his voice notes is going to be quite a challenge to transcribe for anyone. Especially an AI, which will garble the content even more.
So yeah, I hate them, too. Wish there was a setting we could select on the receiving end to disable these.
