Why I love Voice IM

During Voxilate's development and honing of HeyTell Voice Messenger, I've thought a lot about how I use (or don't use) voice mail. While a push-to-talk solution like HeyTell is definitely a great replacement for text messaging/SMS, it's also a lot more efficient than a phone call for a lot of simple, immediate use cases like:

- Where are you? Oh, there you are. (Especially with the geolocation...)
- I'm okay, I wasn't in that building.
- You at the store? Can you pick up some milk? [5 minutes later] Coffee, too!!

The thing with voice mail, too, is that while I don't think of myself as a *very* lazy person, I find that I'm almost always too lazy to check it in a timely manner. Here's what checking voicemail requires of me, lazy person:

1. See the Messages icon on my phone.
2. Dial Voicemail.
3. Type in my passcode.
4. Wait.

If I want to listen to it again, I've got to go through it all again.

I'll be honest and share my typical way of handling voicemail:
1. See the Messages icon on my phone.
2. Look at the last Incoming number.
3. Call them back...thereby avoiding the use of voice mail altogether.
4. At some point when there's more time, cycle through *every* message and save or delete one-by-one.

The cool thing, I think, about HeyTell, is the immediacy of it. Click a button, send a message. Click a button, listen to the message. Save it for later or delete it. Replay it.

Also, I'm a shy person and not just a little bit socially awkward. Therefore, the telephone and I already have issues! When I have voicemail, I feel dread. Why? Something about picking the phone up again, dialing numbers, hoping I'm not interrupting whoever it was in the middle of whatever they are doing.

With HeyTell, the whole transaction is like an instant message - say something, wait for a response, and then respond when you're ready. I'm comfortable with IM. I can get my thoughts together before I type. I can work on other things and then return to it. It's nice to do the same thing with voice. I can reduce a little of that social awkwardness, have more control over the conversation, and stop pushing so many buttons.

Voice IM is really, I think, a best of two worlds combination - you get the intimacy of voice, the grokking of intonation and inflection, the speed and efficiency of not dialing, not typing, not waiting for rings and did you forget to dial that 1?, the ability to pull your thoughts and ideas together as coherently as you can in an email or instant message, and retain the ability to multi-task - a phone call requires your undivided attention. A voice IM? Respond when you can. Save and re-play it when you need to. Fantastic for productivity!

Combine it with location-awareness so that my contacts (and *only* those I allow access) can locate me in a crowd, and it's a win-win for me. Hope others feel the same!