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Voice Notes or Text Messages?

2 points by s-kiel ↗ HN
Hi, people!

Since we're finishing another week, I'm feeling like starting a little debate here; when you're talking to someone, what do you prefer? Voice notes or texts?

Personally, I hate voice notes... I always receive them when I'm really busy or can't hear them.

So, what do you think?

9 comments

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sf4lifer
I started getting voice notes a couple of years ago and disliked them at first. It felt presumptuous of the person that I'd stop and listen to their 4 minute monologue. Scanning a text message is much more convenient. But I ended up really enjoying them because you can actually have an conversation without being on a call. This made me much more accessible and looking at phone far more interesting. It was like having a podcast with a variety of folks from my network.
s-kiel
That's an interesting perspective! It's like having personal podcasts with friends. It's interesting how technology can change our perspectives and make communication more engaging. However, sometimes I can't hear them because I'm in a meeting or just in a noisy public space
sf4lifer
Yah, I'll usually wait until I have a couple of messages, then go for a walk and listen and respond. I have a group message where we all respond via audio messages and it's fun. We've never been able to get that crew on a facetime or zoom at the same time. This allows everyone to participate on their terms.
cajunboi34213
I imagine the future will blend the two so you don't have to choose. Voice dictation is already pretty good. Whatsapp already is doing transcriptions on it's audio messages. IOS17 has visual voicemail and I think transcriptions in audio messages as well. There is also http://www.airwave.us which is a push to talk app that immediately transcribes in different languages.
sourcecodeplz
Depends really, me and my friends we use both but I haven't received a voice message longer than 1 minute.

But most often I prefer actual calls.

s-kiel
Lucky you! Long voice messages are pretty annoying
kixiQu
Every platform ought to transcribe the voice notes. Even a bad transcription can be adequate when you can fall back to listen to the audio. Allo did this and it was great. I wrote a [bot] to do it for Matrix using GCP transcription.

[bot]: https://maya.land/monologues/2021/08/05/matrix-bot-transcrib...

People communicate differently in voice notes than in typed messages, so I like having tech that can accommodate both.