Are voicemail’s days numbered?

Recent articles in both the New York Times (You’ve got voicemail, but do you care?) and Slate (You have no new messages – ever) suggest they may be. The argument against voicemail generally goes like this:

• Voicemail user interfaces are clunky – why should we have to navigate a menu to get our voicemail in the 21st century?
• Voicemail isn’t skimmable – we have to listen to the entire message to make sure we hear all the important stuff.
• Voicemail commands aren’t uniform so we have to listen all the way through or guess at the correct command – “Is it 9 to delete on the home phone but 7 to delete on the office phone or vice versa?”
• There are better options. More and more of them all the time.

I rarely listen to voicemail anymore, frankly. Calls that come in to my business and mobile phones are automatically transcribed and sent both to my email inbox and as text messages to my iPhone. I may eliminate the email inbox version soon, since text messages more than do the trick. And if there’s something I do need to hear (e.g., the transcription’s unclear), I can always dial in and listen.

I use a combination of Jott and Google Voice to make this possible, and there are other well-regarded options like YouMail and PhoneTag.

So what do you think? Why do you love or dislike voicemail?

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.