The practice of communicating using voice notes – short-ish spurts of words spoken into a device – is far from universal.
In Latin America most people elect to speak into their phones over write a text message at least some of the time for content that undeniably does not warrant that amount of production.
Perhaps this is a product of the overwhelming use of Whatsapp as the messaging app of choice, which released the feature fairly early in Latin America, which has a huge installed base of Android phones. iMessage is just not going to work for most people.
Or perhaps there is something else, related to the strong social ties, a family-first culture that encourages putting energy into being with loved over being in the office.
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I once heard a foreigner comment on how odd it was to see so many people walking down the streets of Buenos Aires speaking into their phones, alien behavior to citizens of most other parts of the world.
(My Indian-American friend says brown people everywhere do this, which I am sure is accurate.)
Their use is not for everyone. A recurring meme comments on how toxic they are, how people use them for short, unimportant messages that could have easily been typed, which is fair.
The joke goes that every message is prefaced with “Hi – send an audio note since it’s easier…” without needing to point out whom exactly it is easier for. I once got a one-second message whose entire content was the word “OK” from a friend I was picking up in my car. That clearly should have been a text.
That’s culture for you, people get used to doing things a certain way. Many times it’s easier to not look up from your phone, just hit that little microphone and ramble into the phone.
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In defense of voice notes: they offer flexibility for the recipient. You do not have to listen on the spot like you would on a phone call. You can find a time and place of your choosing, one that is most convenient for you.
You can listen while doing chores or talking a walk, much like a podcast, dedicating only part of your brain to the content of the message. There is even the option to accelerate reproduction speed to 1.5x (or even 2x for the truly adventurous). Of course the cost of multi-tasking is very high, we are much less skilled at it that we’d like to think.
The other big advantage is that the recipient cannot interrupt. In a world where most people only listen so they get a chance to speak, this forces you to actually not interrupt and think about what the other person said before replying. At least with part of your attention, that is. This is an important muscle that deserves attention; in a world of non-stop stimulus when do we actually stop and give our undivided attention to what someone else is saying?
Counterpoint: This is all negated by the not-uncommon practice of replying with short spurts of text while still listening to the original message. Especially when the audio is over one minute, perhaps justified by the need to “not forget” what the sender is saying, it tempts the recipient to think about their response and what they want to say.
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Audio messages will never stop having their place, at least until someone invents a way to text with your brain (they are working on it), given the convenience of avoiding the need for a synchronous live phone call, morphed in the 2020s into a never-ending stream of videoconferences, which at its core demands coordination between two parties and are therefore the pinnacle of interruption.
Async will always win.
