My group cat has spoken: vocal memos are better than SMS

There is something about Hear the voice of a dead woman for a long time who could well give you chills. It looks like a portal to the past. Especially when you hear his English trill say, clear as a bell despite his recording on a rough phonographer in 1890: “When I am no longer a memory, just a name, I hope that my voice could perpetuate the great work of my life.” Then she announces her name, so that the listeners of New magic technology Would know who spoke: Florence Nightingale.

You don’t need to be a story student to feel amazed by audio and feel like the famous nurse is in the room. In a very real sense, it is: its voice vibrates against your walls, through your eardrums, in a way that no handwritten document can reproduce.

No wonder, at a time when the average smartphone Spend approximately seven hours a day on their screen, when the conversation was subsumed by GIFs, Emojis and text text, that people start to suck in something that makes them feel as strongly: vocal communications. Like the slow food movement of the late 1980s found glory worldwide among people tired of artificial fast food, audio helps people slow down their way of discussing and enjoying communication as a ritual, not a way to reach an end.

I’m ecstatic on board with that. I live in Singapore but maintain a long race Whatsapp group cat With old university friends from the United Kingdom. A few months ago, one of them, Matt, suggested a challenge: we each send a voice note once a week. His highly British justification: “It is both more personal and less complicated than writing a message largely.” As soon as we started, we were all surprised by the meaning of the ritual. Whenever I hear (literally) the gang, we have the impression that we are not 37, but still 19, Laughing in our Dickensan student apartment. The habit emoji Or even a text of test length.

The vocal memos have become more than communications; These are meditations.

Things quickly became competitive when we try to go up our recording times. My four -minute initial piddler was quickly beaten by missives doubling this length. But what I like the most is how live They feel. “Recording it just on a train,” said a person, while another monologue could be interrupted by someone who stumbles on his cat, or looks in his refrigerator to decide what is for dinner. All banal and slices of life – and yet the very essence of life – that we never even think of sending an SMS. The down is the right thing, the relational glue you want to hear about in a world urging us to always optimize. These Memos vocaux have become more than communications; These are meditations, useful means for removing things from my chest.

Even so, the simple beginning of the habit was strange, at a time when most of us are constantly on our phones but Unable to make phone calls. It was like we asked to type in a waiting room. As a person who writes to earn a living, I appreciate the keyboard like a canvas to blur, then to modify brutally, my words to an inch of their life before daring to hit Send. Facing the “Maintain to save” button in my group catI make my way through a short monologue. My words have doubled on themselves, I lost my thought, I said “Umm” twice every sentence – and that’s where the point resides, I quickly realized. His flood made him real. My speech by my friends have had the rarest qualities today: not filtered.

The texts “gives priority to speed and convenience on depth and heat”, explains Mary Chayko, sociologist and professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. The retro attraction of “Talk Tech” can “help us connect to the source of the voice in a deeper and more personal way,” she adds. “There are layers and levels with a human voice that simply cannot be found in the text, regardless of construction elegantly.”

Even while we turn to the centenary balm of crackling voice through the air, technology changes our relationship with human voice. In a few clicks, you can now bring dear deaths to life, provided you have a recording of extracts. “Prepare a registration of the deceased that you want to clone in advance,” explains the strangely joyful proofer in four steps for the Vidnoz AI application. In a few moments, the boastful marketing copy: “You can hear the voices of your elders again, or your mourning children can hear their loved ones tell them stories.”

Chayko is skeptical. She maintains that even an almost perfect clone can never reproduce the imperfect heat of a real loved His voice. This is like the difference between a real van gogh portrait and a perfect false – the latter will always feel fraudulent for those who know that it is a copy. “In fact, the clon the voice can be close to the original, the more unsatisfactory and disturbing it will be,” explains Chayko. After all, the more AI’s voice looks like grandmother, the more we remember that grandmother will never be in the room with us.

But for the most vulnerable demography, even a voice generated by the machine can offer surprising comfort. All over the world, the elderly solitary turn to applications like AlexaGoogle Home or Elliq for the Company. “If the voice makes us feel something, it can absolutely take some of the qualities of a real relationship,” explains Chayko. As unreal as these voices can be, their parasocial or what Chayko calls the “socioal” effect is undeniable. “We know that we do not share a physical experience with them, but we can always worry about them, even a lot,” she said.

Lesson learned: if you want to connect, talk.

Meanwhile, the young generations fight solitude with Talk Tech in an even more immediate way. At the height of the pandemic locks, Hinge presented Two simple remedies for remote dating. Vocal prompts allow you to send potential parameters a 30 -second sample of your dulcet tones, on the basis of a list of prompts such as sharing “your best daddy’s joke”. And the notes of voice let the matches flirt the voice in the voice, like the good old days. Hinge says the two were a resounding success. “We have found that the characteristics of the voice are a secret ingredient for the trigger connections,” said a spokesperson for the hinge. “In 2024, conversations with vocal notes were 40% more likely to drive on a date, and people who added a voice prompt to their profile were 32% more likely to take a date.” Other Dating applications As Tinder and Bumble have also added vocal features. Lesson learned: if you want Connect, speak.

Anna Davis, a British teacher in an international school in Singapore, told me that she found the potential matches of matches on dating applications in a mixed bag. “Someone once sang ‘Aladdin’ ‘, you know,” I can show you the wooooorld “- a really creaky version,” she told me. Most users who make recordings are guys, she says. Since women are likely to be struck anyway, it seems less necessary for them to record a severe clip. But listening to a recording could be a useful acid test, to help judge if a guy feels authentic before meeting the IRL.

Different nationalities are also presented differently before the microphone, notes Davis. “The Americans are very opposite and seem to be very put in place, speaking of their quality”, while “the British are generally quite Jokey,” she said. “Singaporeans normally speak of the things they like to do during their free time.”

Others are even less in love with vocal notes. Erica Wong, founder of a content consulting firm that worked with Technological brands such as Google And x, finds them too long and impractical. But ask her for another retro conversation tool, and she lights up. “For me, the dictation is my default way of composing written messages because I have gradually become impatient with the shot,” she said. Wong “types” works both and personal messages and emails with his voice.

Vocal notes Can also be particularly attractive for certain cultures. Wong, who has the Chinese inheritance, notes that the generation of his mother is a big fan, because a recording cancels the delicate need to type Chinese characters on a small keyboard. And soon, sharing Wong, his family will start a project with audio in his heart. “My family and I have just managed to do a series of vocal interviews with our aunts and uncles from 60 to 80 years old as a way to document their memories and their stories, in case we never want to write a book, or confirm something in our family history.” Registered by relatives of the whole world and stored on a shared reader, the audio of the clan will serve as a living archive.

This desire to document and preserve our voices is not the one that will disappear soon. There are countless online forums of desperate people to recover vocal messages from parents who have just died. And every year on the September 11 anniversaryPeople around the world listen to vocal messaging Brian Sweeney left his wife a few minutes before his plane flies in the southern tower. Her last words offer us a poignant reminder so that we all dropped the texts, and do what grew up to feel so not natural – connect through our voices: “Jules, it’s Brian. Listen, I’m on an plane that has been diverted. If things are not doing well, and it’s not okay, I just want me to know, I want to be good.

I had seen articles on Sweeney, but I had never bored to listen. Now that I have heard the crackling of the line and calm in his voice, I remember Florence Nightingale again. Will my voice and family be heard in the next century? Probably not – but I will still suggest that we drop a recording from time to time, especially when we are separated. There is nothing like the impression that your beloved is in the room with you.

Daniel Seifert is an independent writer. He lives in Singapore.