So first, I asked friends – and friends of friends – in Britain.<\/p>\n
As it happens, I love voice notes. But I’m aware that they get on my sister Ramya’s nerves.<\/p>\n
“The reason I hate voice notes is, it’s so imbalanced,” Ramya told me.<\/p>\n
“For the person who’s sending the voice note, it’s super easy. They just have to press the button and then they can ramble on. But for the person who’s receiving\u2026 they’ve got to just pay all their attention to this voice note.<\/p>\n
“You get a six-minute voice note, and you don’t know if they’re telling you that their house burnt down and their cat died, or if they’re just talking about how lovely their day is.”<\/p>\n
The Gen Z apprentice on my team, Gyasi, told me he found them “a bit of a nuisance”, specifically because you need headphones to listen to them.<\/p>\n
But perhaps counter-intuitively, given younger people in Britain are most likely to use voice notes, Gyasi’s mother, 53-year-old Buzz, said they were a handy way of putting off an overdue phone call.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Daniela, 30, said: “Voice notes stress me out a little bit, because once you open them you’re committed to listening to the whole thing.”<\/p>\n
Josh Parry, the BBC’s LGBT and Identity reporter, is perhaps the biggest voice note-lover in my life. His messages have been known to get up to 15 minutes long on occasion (no, I’m not exaggerating).<\/p>\n
“I think that they can add really good context when you’re talking about something, you can discuss things in a way that maybe is a bit harder to write down, and you can get across the nuance,” Josh told me.<\/p>\n
“It’s also really handy instead of texting when I’m walking the dogs.”<\/p>\n
Another friend, designer and business owner Naomi, said they are useful when her hands are full \u2013 “I love sending voice notes when I’m busy\u2026 if I have lots going on, if I have the kids around and I’m trying to multitask.”<\/p>\n
“It feels like a nice way to be a bit more connected,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So first, I asked friends – and friends of friends – in Britain. As it happens, I love…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-550956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}