I do think that voice messaging is a waste of time compared to reading. You can read fast enough to churn out information, but you need to wait for every second to digest the information in a voice call.
>You can read fast enough to churn out information, but you need to wait for every second to digest the information in a voice call. This can happen, but I can reread the message or just parts of it fairly easy. With voice messages it's getting annoying when you need to rewind to a specific part of it, especially if the message is 2-3 minutes long.
And there is also the audio quality and background noise, but it's a different topic.
That's highly person-dependent. Some kind of auditory processing disorder runs in my family, and I definitely have it. Under a lot of conditions, I need to spend extra time to digest and understand what has been said.
But not everyone is like this. For a lot of people, hearing is digesting, is understanding.
And like many things, people presume that their own experience is the universal experience- you presume everyone needs to digest, and the person sending you the audio message presumes everyone can process it instantly.
I agree you can read faster than listen, but I just don’t buy that typing is faster than talking though, not for conversation. When you talk, the speaking and the listening are overlapping. Sentences are generally understood before the speaker even finishes saying them. That’s doesn’t happen with text chat. When you type into chat, the communication is serialized. There are reasons a group sitting together might use devices instead of talking, but I find it hard to believe that efficiency of speech is really a primary reason, unless you’re talking about sharing media like sources, images & movies, quotes, references, code, etc. for a group project.
Also, as a language learner I can write 我是美国人。 But can I speak it properly ? Being able to send voice messages is a great option