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Is Voicemail on the Road to Extinction?

by Warren Riddle on April 5, 2009 at 06:09 PM

If you've let your voicemail box clog up with messages that you've already returned, or that you know you don't need to check, you're not alone. As a result of several factors, including the ongoing text messaging boom and the growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, voicemail use is on the wane may soon be as relevant as a cassette-tape answering machine or a floppy disk, the New York Times writes.

uReach Technologies, a firm which handles voice messaging duties for Verizon Wireless and other carriers, claims that over 30-percent of voicemail messages remain unchecked for at least three days, and that 20-percent of their customers never call to check their messages at all. Another marketing research group, the Opinion Research Corporation, released a separate study demonstrating that 91-percent of subjects under 30 answer text messages within an hour, and, according to The New York Times, "are four times more likely to respond within minutes to a text than to a voice message."

Several companies are currently selling programs that convert voicemails to text messages (although those paid services are sure to suffer at the hand of Google's imminent and free-of-charge Google Voice). With such programs, mobile users can read an immediate transcript of a message without having to dial the number, enter a password, press 1, press 1, press 1, and then slog through inane and tedious messages they don't intend to return. According to James Siminoff of PhoneTag, one such service, customers can run through their converted texts up to 20 times faster than they can the original voice messages.



We're wholly familiar with this trend, as our vocie mailbox has been full for a while now. That's partially on purpose, however. How can we honestly tell someone, "Oh really, I never got your message," if it's staring us in the face? But, seriously, this movement seems long overdue. Why push 20 buttons to listen to messages for half an hour, when you can press one button and scroll through your texts in less than five?

As Piers Fawkes, a trend investigator, told the trend research site PSFK.com, "Voicemail feels like it was a technology that was created to fill a gap - until something better came along. And, now it has." We've been waiting, but there is one aspect of voicemail we'll miss: Temper-prone celebrities (and our friends) making fools of themselves. [From: The New York Times]

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Tags: google, iphone, studies, text messaging, TextMessaging, transcription services, TranscriptionServices, trends, verizon, voicemail

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