It's harder to talk on the phone now. Voice quality is terrible with VoIP. Noise rejection is poor with flat phone microphones. One person I talk to regularly is too much into hands-free, and calls are mostly background noise. Something the compression algorithms handle badly.

Most inbound phone calls are telemarketing now, anyway. When I answer my phone, and it's an unknown number, I say nothing and wait. If it's a human, they'll eventually say something. Autodial systems will time out after 5 seconds without something that sounds vaguely like "Hello".