Has the voice mail reached the end of its usefulness? Farhad Manjoo thinks so.
Since March, I’ve been using Google Voice, the search company’s fantastic Web app that gives you a single number to connect all your phones and lets you make rules about who can call which phone when. Voice is packed with many other amazing tricks, but there’s one feature that I’ve come to value above all: The software transcribes voice mail messages into text. Now every time someone leaves me a message, I get it as an e-mail. It’s not perfect, of course—Farhad often turns into Bob or Todd. But I’ll take it. Voice mail is one of the most inefficient, socially awkward, and least user-friendly means of communication out there, and I’d gladly change my name to Bob, Todd, or Sue if it means never having to sit through a parade of pointless messages ever again.
Google Voice is not the only thing killing phone messages. Every new way we develop of talking to one another—e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging, Twitter, etc.—is faster and more useful than leaving an audio message on someone’s phone. That’s why, according to cell phone companies, lots of people only rarely dial in to their messages, and some of us have stopped checking entirely. It won’t be long till we’re all in that camp; the end of voice mail is nigh, and it won’t be missed.