from Hacker News

Voice Notes or Text Messages?

by s-kiel on 7/14/23, 12:38 PM with 9 comments

Hi, people!

Since we're finishing another week, I'm feeling like starting a little debate here; when you're talking to someone, what do you prefer? Voice notes or texts?

Personally, I hate voice notes... I always receive them when I'm really busy or can't hear them.

So, what do you think?

  • by kixiQu on 7/16/23, 5:43 PM

    Every platform ought to transcribe the voice notes. Even a bad transcription can be adequate when you can fall back to listen to the audio. Allo did this and it was great. I wrote a [bot] to do it for Matrix using GCP transcription.

    [bot]: https://maya.land/monologues/2021/08/05/matrix-bot-transcrib...

    People communicate differently in voice notes than in typed messages, so I like having tech that can accommodate both.

  • by sf4lifer on 7/14/23, 12:50 PM

    I started getting voice notes a couple of years ago and disliked them at first. It felt presumptuous of the person that I'd stop and listen to their 4 minute monologue. Scanning a text message is much more convenient. But I ended up really enjoying them because you can actually have an conversation without being on a call. This made me much more accessible and looking at phone far more interesting. It was like having a podcast with a variety of folks from my network.

  • by cajunboi34213 on 7/14/23, 1:01 PM

    I imagine the future will blend the two so you don't have to choose. Voice dictation is already pretty good. Whatsapp already is doing transcriptions on it's audio messages. IOS17 has visual voicemail and I think transcriptions in audio messages as well. There is also http://www.airwave.us which is a push to talk app that immediately transcribes in different languages.

  • by ezedv on 7/14/23, 12:57 PM

    You can use TranscribeMe! https://www.transcribeme.app/en

    Highly recommended for those who can't hear them or just don't like them xD

  • by sourcecodeplz on 7/14/23, 1:39 PM

    Depends really, me and my friends we use both but I haven't received a voice message longer than 1 minute.

    But most often I prefer actual calls.