The WhatsApp voice message is very common in Spain. I always find it jarring when I'm there, mostly because I'm not used to it, but also because it seems to defeat the purpose of the messaging app: I can't listen to your voice message on the bus, for instance.

It's so normalized there that I wonder whether this is a particularly Spanish habit. Maybe there are a bunch of countries where people routinely leave each other voice recordings on WhatsApp/Messenger/etc, and I just haven't been to them yet.

I used to answer this with "I'm not listening to that, not even my parents send me voice messages" but it was called uncivil by some people, so now I just say "I can't listen to that right now" and never listen, eventually ppl send a text message.

Yeah, the perceived friction in a voice message seems to be immense. I sent one voice massage in the past year because I wanted to get a big idea over to someone as I was walking into a meeting, so I recorded a 20-second message and sent it. She ended up responding 9 hours later with "I finally got around to listening to this, thanks!"

Won't be doing that again!

Modern problems require modern solutions.

Same here in Uruguay but only for certain interactions (like contractors). Thankfully there’s a transcription feature that catches 90% of the message generally.

Maybe it's a cultural thing in the Spanish speaking world? Had the same experience in Colombia.

The way I handle those, especially with the people who leave me 8 minute long voice notes, is to have WhatsApp transcribe the voice note for me. Or, if that’s not possible, either ignore the voice note or listen to it at 2x speed.

I was surprised WhatsApp didn't give me a "transcribe" button (as recently as yesterday). Seems like it'd be pretty easy to implement that.

I don’t have a transcribe button in the Windows app, but my Android phone has a transcribe button.

I can't understand why whatsapp does not provide tgat out of the box. Telegram has it on the paid plan, which is nit ideal but at least somewhat out of the box solution.

No thanks. If the sender wants to avoid typing then he should use the transcribe function and take responsibility for any errors in it.

Are the messages in Spanish or English?

Both: English messages sent to me, and I also see my friends do it in Spanish for messages sent to other people.

It's a habit in specific countries, China is one in my experience.

It’s funny to me how I judge some cultural aspects as being worse. Of course it’s my own cultural bias, but I think the following things are “bad” for cultures to do:

1) long voice memos over succinctly typed notes

2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc

3) habitually late or not on time

> 2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc

Also even queueing can have different norms. Here people rush to a newly opened supermarket checkout like their life depended on it. I feel that should be a lot less sociably acceptable than it is, especially for those with overfilled carts that will add huge delays for anyone behind them.

Was just in south America, everyone uses it.

You just gave me strong memories of using voice messages for a couple of months some years ago. In my defence, I had dropped a circular saw blade through the tip of my finger which slowed down my typing for a while. (I did manage to get surprisingly fast as a nine-finger touch typist, sans the left index finger.)

Fortunately my colleagues were very understanding, and I reverted back to text once I could type reasonably well and with minimal pain again.

I absolutely understand that some situations require voice messages, and I think everyone else in a chat would too.

Also, circular sawblades are terrifying.

Fortunately, if they send it as a text message or voicemail, I get automatic transcription.

Too bad that’s not more universal.

In WhatsApp?

Same here. I sometimes dont feel like typing but I use voice dictation, that should be the first option in a text convo imo.

I use dictation a lot and god it’s so bad. I have to correct something every single time.

Which is part of the reason why sending a voice message that the receiver might have to read a transcription of is so bad.

God forbid...? Our technology has led us to compartmentalize information exchange and relational interaction. We just don't have time for the latter. But in text, tone and context are often lost, and it is also less accessible to type for many people. I'm interested in what it looks like when we normalize the actual friction of being in relationship, not just prioitize the "time savings" to recipients of communication by boiling it down to the information conveyed only by the words.

Literacy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI.

To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of their time.

I think this is a pretty unfair takeaway when AI generated text is often so wordy, flowery, and full of jargon and abstract nouns. People are never going to read East of Eden or academic dissertations as quickly as direct, simple language either

It's hard to talk about it in a very general way without being wrong a significant percentage of the time.

I suspect we're both right, just on different occasions.

Because this is a thread about other people's usage of AI, so how I/you personally use it is irrelevant because we still have to deal with everyone else pasting AI, in which case it is generally long and wordy.

In my experience it is the semi literate people who love generative AI the most. The people who struggled to form sentenced and hated reading.

I think some people suck (myself included) at writing and are amazed that they can finally generate text (fortunately not myself).

So their output from an llm has the halo/ikea/endowment effect and they want to show off what they “wrote.”

Writing is actually super easy. Editing and writing well is the hard part. It’s like co-workers who wrote a terrible book being excited just because they wrote a book.

I am literate and hyperlexic - I read ~500 words a minute, and have read thousands of books for fun.

I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons, but one of them is the way it bastardizes and ruins the written word.

It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do.

The signal-to-noise ratio in genAI writing is just wretched.

Yes, I can read the thousand-word ball of muck you pasted from Claude in about thirty seconds, but it could have been one second had you used your mind instead of committing a worthless act that cost me time and gained both of us nothing.

> It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do.

Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above.

> I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons

Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good:

a) Always find them to be bad

b) Are always bad at using them

Well my coworkers are the ones sending me the AI text and it's always garbage. And they're using Claude on the newest models. And they're all drastically more enthusiastic about AI than me.

So yeah, maybe every single person in my company sucks at Claude, or maybe Claude just actually sucks at writing and you don't know what bad writing looks like

Claude does suck at writing. No argument here. It's for coding, and it's good at that.

So if the goal is "writing" and they are using Claude, then they do in fact suck at it.

Its like using a butter knife instead of a screwdriver. It might work if you waste enough effort, but will never do the same quality of work a screwdriver can.

> Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above.

I use Claude every day, by corporate mandate, generally with Opus 4.8 or 5, but sometimes Sonnet 5 (per corporate demand to both use LLMs heavily and simultaneously keep the bills within a budget).

I hate doing it, but I get results my coworkers, PMs, and end users are happy with.

> Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good...

I admit regularly that LLMs do amazing things. They're astonishingly good at breaking security, for instance.

That doesn't mean I like them.

And no, they really are not good at writing.

When you feel the impulse to be defensive, that's often a sign that asking questions will be more worthwhile than leaping into the defensive posture.

In my experience it is the semi-literate who are most impressed by AI writing and the ones who use it the most to write for them.

ChatGPT can talk voice to voice to I don’t really get where you’re coming from.

People are just afraid of billionaires becoming trillionaires and not having food and shelter

OK, but are you hiring semi-literate people to do jobs that involve writing at your company?

Everyone is. They just don't always know that.