[avens19]

English is vague, even when accounting for that fact. It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.

My biggest issue with this concept is time. You write your wall of text, I see that you've failed to account for some factor, so I write my wall of text. You don't completely understand my wall of text and ask for clarification. Back and forth, asynchronously. In a call this can be resolved in minutes. Over text this could take days

[ipsento606]

>It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.

I really couldn't disagree more strongly. I think it's much easier to correct misunderstandings over text. In a spoken discussion, there is a high degree of temporal entropy - the longer it's been since you made a point, the worse my recollection of your exact point may be. Detail and nuance is lost. But if you write your point down, I can refer to it at any point without any real loss of information.

In my experience, it's relatively common for two people to leave a spoken discussion thinking they have a strong, shared understanding, and only much later do they realize that's not the case.

[dijksterhuis]

yeah i agree. i’ve had so many instances where i’ve got off a call and then a week later the person

* has a fundamentally different understanding of the facts discussed [0]

* has forgotten the important facts even when they were highlighted as important

* has completely forgotten most of the conversation, sometimes even forgetting we had a conversation

* has just made some shit up in their head that was never even talked about

… and once again i’d have to go over the whole thing again for an hour, so we’re back where we started a week later. this is normal “fuzzy human brain stuff”. people forget details over the course of a week, especially new details.

but yeah; if it’s not written down it doesn’t exist is my mantra now.

[0]: note to say this was not because they went and spoke to someone else and got more detail, other opinions etc. the detail would just get warped in their brain over the course of a week.

[theshrike79]

This is why after a call there needs to be meeting notes or action points (hate that term) that all parties read and confirm are correct.

Or else you can just act as if it didn't happen.

[ninalanyon]

I have the opposite experience. Phone calls almost always leave me feeling that something important has been left out. But there is no record so I can't re-read it to find out if I forgot or if it was just not mentioned. Luckily I rarely had to deal with such things because most of my work required written specifications and technical standards anyway, plus our teams were scattered in widely different time zones so the windows for live contacts were small.

[xyzzyz]

It's very easy today to transcribe and summarize every call that you have.

[Insimwytim]

If you don't care about privacy, consent and other ethical implications.

[srdjanr]

Why? You can (and should) ask for consent, and you already need to trust your app (assuming Teams etc) for calls/messages. You can also run transcription models locally