[dbish]

Yep, trying to improve voicemail is the wrong product approach, it’s like trying to improve the fax machine. You can, and some people still do for a variety of reasons that shouldn’t really exist, but it’s time has come and gone a long time again and we don’t need it anymore. You can do almost everything without it. On a personal level, I don’t leave them or even have access to my own. For businesses, table stakes should be online schedulers and ways to contact and get help (such as putting yourself on a queue for a callback). Having worked on “voice bots” and chat bots many of them, such as this use case, are a bandaid over existing tech interface issues imho instead of a real improvement since they introduce transcription and natural language processing errors that wouldn’t be needed if the business just had a simple app or website.