Please Leave A Message After The Beep
Not much has changed in leaving voicemail messages.
I remember endless cassettes. Not in the common way. My violin teacher would record the piece I was studying onto one and I was supposed to listen to it on a bedside cassette player as I fell asleep. The idea was to help me commit the music to memory. These tapes were normally used in answering machines and used to play the “leave a message after the beep”.
The mechanics of leaving a voice mail message when calling have been pretty much the same. A few variations have been to press * to delete or re-record the message or to leave a call back number. Of the thousands of voice messages I’ve left, I’ve done the re-record option less than five times and the call back number once… and it was utterly useless. I’ve never received a call back number request.
Messaging services like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have changed this quite a bit. You can see if your message was received and have options for sending attachments along with voicemail. Like VoLTE, maybe similar features can be pushed to carriers.
On the other side, we’re started to see AI like Google Assistant start to screen inbound calls on Google Pixel devices. If carriers don’t act, others will eat their lunch.
