A funeral for voicemail - The Oatmeal

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Your phone will show the phone number of the person who left the voicemail. Please think.

Not every number is private or unknown. Please think.

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Are these people just raw dogging phones calls?

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I send all unknown calls to voice mail. I’ve had my carrier disable voice mail for my phone line.
My providers all use email or are ‘known’ by my phone. … I hope.

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So when the new specialty pharmacy phones you for details on where to send your prescription, you’re just gonna … not?

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Voicemail’s definitely not dead.

I can’t find any voicemail services that work the way I want them to though, so I started building my own using Twilio to handle the incoming phone call + ElevenLabs for text-to-speech + AssemblyAI for speech-to-text + Trestle Smart CNAM API for identifying the caller. I’ll open-source the code once it’s ready.

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I don’t answer the phone for unknown numbers. Super simple

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My pharmacies have always sent me a text notification that my prescription is ready for pick up. The only people calling my phone are scammers

Jolteon

Yep, if it’s important they’ll leave a message. Wait…

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If it’s important I’ll be expecting a phone call or know who is calling me. All that a voicemail does is tell spammers that they have a valid and active phone number that they should keep calling.

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Yeah. I’m very thankful that my work operates by the same expectations.

Anyone calling unscheduled is urgent enough that I probably shouldn’t waste time listening to the voicemail. Every other call is scheduled, anyway.

It leaves my work voicemail delightfully empty.

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“Hi honey, it’s me. I’m calling from the hospital, my phone was damaged in the crash. I know this area code is weird, we were only about halfway to Grandma’s when we were hit…”

“Unknown number? I’m not listening to that shit, I’m waiting for my wife to call when she gets to her parents house!”

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Seems awfully over complicated. Why not just use some twiml verbs like <say> and <gather>?

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I’m happy for you that you’ve never had to deal with length prior authorizations, specialty pharmacies, need for clarifications, notifications of delay …

I remember being on the phone with my pharmacist a few hours before my wedding - he called so something could get sorted out ASAP. Fortunately that one didn’t have to go to voicemail.

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Twilio’s TTS isn’t as good as ElevenLabs, and their transcription isn’t as good as AssemblyAI. AssemblyAI can pull key details out of the message (eg people’s names, company names, callback numbers, etc) and IIRC it’s quite a bit cheaper than Twilio’s transcription. AssemblyAI provide $50 free credit to try their service, which should last me a very long time assuming it doesn’t expire.

Plus now I can put “AI engineer” on my resume, lol. A lot of “AI” is all about gluing other people’s work together, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.

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I had voicemail deactivated for decades. I’m not reachable? Call again later or write a message. Now that I’m older I had to reactivate it because contractors, pharmacy etc. expect and use it to send me information.

I hate voice messages in WhatsApp and the like but I can see the usage for others. My wife communicates with her friends this way. When you have to watch the kids you can send and listen to messages without having to look at your phone.

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Spammers never ever leave voicemails, that’s how I know a call was spam. If someone actually needs me, either I have their numbers already or they leave a voicemail

𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒆𝒍

I think the voicemail thing is very country specific, I mean here in Poland voicemail is the first thing to disable when you get the phone number, it’s even considered rude to have it enabled, it stems from the times when the calls were billed by the minute and carriers seemed to switch to voicemails after too soon, like after 1-2 beeps and “sending signals” (calling without answering to communicate, like “I’ll send you a signal when I’ll be there” or something) was popular among the young people

On the other hand the answering machines weren’t a thing here, maybe it’s connected?

Also I don’t get the reason behind “but some random business might call me”, isn’t that an unsolicited call? Of course it’s a completely different thing when your number is a business number, but on the other hand why not send an email? Guessing it’s a deeply cultural thing stemming from aforementioned answering machines, for me listening through the voice message is inefficient, I prefer text content, like I’d rather read the article than view the video summary, but I know some people prefer it

And here we are in the times of voice messages, my wife uses it to communicate with her friend and I’m tired of hearing those umms, food swallowing, lip smacking etc

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Edit: guy hosts his comics on amazonaws.

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Fucking WhatsApp, thanks for nothing assholes

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I always get “An unresolved issue in our office requires your immediate attention, please call XYZ” with no other identifying information. I’ve learned to clear my inbox without listening to anything because if we had an existing relationship they’d say so.

…did you think I was lying or something? why would you say “spammers never ever leave voicemails” if I just said they do, lol