The voice of extinction

Three cheers to two Christchurch students, who have come up with Vxt, a new way of quickly checking voicemails by way of an app, which transcribes voicemails, turning them into text or email. Think of the years wasted trying to retrieve those pesky missed voicemails. All that poking and bashing of fingers on the cellphone keypad entering one’s pin number, only to be told in the coldest and sniffiest of voices, ‘‘blah is not a correct pin number, please enter your correct pin number’’. And then you have to start all over again. When you’ve finally completed voicemail procedure, it’s 10-1 the payoff is to receive an incoherent and unimportant voicemail.

Mea culpa. I too have left such irritating messages. I too have broken the voicemail golden rule that, if it’s not important, don’t leave a message, but have left a message saying ‘‘This message isn’t important, so don’t bother replying to it’’. Duh.

Everyone pretty much ignores voicemails, but feels compelled to plough through them in case they herald tidings of births, death, or a job offer. However, no-one should ignore the voicemail of a parent. If you’re on the receiving end of a parental voicemail, you should respond pronto, because you’re under a blood contract to phone at least once a week to say you’re OK. It’s just manners, the right thing to do.

Voicemails have been obsolete for years, and this iteration of them by way of Vxt is overdue and welcome. After all, we’re leaving two million of them a day, and that’s a lot of time processing the buggers.

Remember Girls, the hit HBO TV series about an aspiring young writer and her 20-something girlfriends? Created by the wunderkind of her age, Lena Dunham, the show’s most cynical character was the beautiful Jessa, who had the anti-social voicemail greeting that went something like this: ‘‘I would never listen to a voicemail message – but if you insist on trying . . .’’

Newer cars come with screens that receive phone calls while you’re driving – and it’s legal. The phone conversations actually interrupt radio broadcasts, as if they were of national importance. Arriving texts appear on the screen and, if you so choose, a posh voice with perfect enunciation reads out the most uncouth messages left by pals.

It’s like that moment in My Fair Lady after Eliza has, under the tutelage of Professor Higgins, aced elocution lessons but blunders the small talk at the Ascot races. A coterie of London aristocrats has gathered round Eliza and are confused and astonished to hear the unknown and elegantly dressed young woman as she politely sips tea and relates an inappropriate anecdote about how her father had ‘‘ladled the gin’’ down her ailing aunt’s throat – ‘‘till it fair done her in’’.

With leaps and bounds in technology, perhaps text messages transcribed for car journeys should be read in a voice as close as possible to the accent of the sender. Perhaps we will be asked to give consent for access to all of our phone conversations for the purposes of harvesting our idiosyncratic word pronunciation. Perfectionists wanting to leave a good impression could go to recording studios and work their way through the dictionary.

In the meantime, those vexed by voicemails can take the app-ortunity to get theirs Vxted. Any excuse to avoid listening to the sound of another human voice.

Soon our voices will become completely redundant. The human tongue will register on a branch of the endangered species list, and we’ll get to listen to our dying dulcet tones lumped in with the bird calls on RNZ.