I do think that voice messaging is a waste of time compared to reading. You can read fast enough to churn out information, but you need to wait for every second to digest the information in a voice call.
"Ehm, I wanted to tell you, you know, eventually (...)" <- this are three to five seconds I'm not getting any information, but if it would be text, my brain would skip this unimportant part instantly. This is why I never listen to voice messages. If it's important to be expressed with your voice, then call.
>You can read fast enough to churn out information, but you need to wait for every second to digest the information in a voice call.
This can happen, but I can reread the message or just parts of it fairly easy. With voice messages it's getting annoying when you need to rewind to a specific part of it, especially if the message is 2-3 minutes long.
And there is also the audio quality and background noise, but it's a different topic.
> you need to wait for every second to digest the information in a voice call.
That's highly person-dependent. Some kind of auditory processing disorder runs in my family, and I definitely have it. Under a lot of conditions, I need to spend extra time to digest and understand what has been said.
But not everyone is like this. For a lot of people, hearing is digesting, is understanding.
And like many things, people presume that their own experience is the universal experience- you presume everyone needs to digest, and the person sending you the audio message presumes everyone can process it instantly.
You’re not accounting for the time it takes to compose text, and use thumbs to type text. I can’t stand trying to plan outings with people via text because it’s so damn slow and the message size is so small. We always end up calling each other to talk it out because it’s many times faster.
I remember group projects in college where we would sit together, but because we were all using laptops and had full keyboards, it was quicker for us to type our thoughts in a group chat on the laptop than to verbally converse with each other even though we were all sitting within a few feet of each other.
Typing with a keyboard is a good point - it’s fast. I can average almost twice my Boggle score if I type instead of writing.
I agree you can read faster than listen, but I just don’t buy that typing is faster than talking though, not for conversation. When you talk, the speaking and the listening are overlapping. Sentences are generally understood before the speaker even finishes saying them. That’s doesn’t happen with text chat. When you type into chat, the communication is serialized. There are reasons a group sitting together might use devices instead of talking, but I find it hard to believe that efficiency of speech is really a primary reason, unless you’re talking about sharing media like sources, images & movies, quotes, references, code, etc. for a group project.
>You can read fast enough to churn out information, but you need to wait for every second to digest the information in a voice call. This can happen, but I can reread the message or just parts of it fairly easy. With voice messages it's getting annoying when you need to rewind to a specific part of it, especially if the message is 2-3 minutes long.
And there is also the audio quality and background noise, but it's a different topic.