New phone voice app for the millennial snowflakes who prefer not to talk

Technology built to help deaf people communicate finds market among young who can’t or won’t converse

Margi Murphy

Gabriella Swerling

CAFE menus have been adapted to fuel their avocado habit and estate agents have perfected rental pitches for them.

Now technology is adapting to the whims of the millennial generation with an app for those who are shy of telephone conversations.

The Google app, originally created for deaf people, creates a virtual voice to read out a text message to someone on the other end of a phone call.

Yossi Matias, a Google engineer, said that the new feature had great potential for younger people who prefer screen conversations to a phone call.

“As it turns out, many people, especially the younger generation, do not subscribe to the idea of having a conversation over the phone,” he said.

With instant responses and predictive writing suggestions, the Live Replay app helps make typing fast enough to keep up with the speed of speech.

Mr Matias said that the potential for the technology to transform how we use phones and communicate was “pretty tremendous”.

According to a 2017 report, most millennials and Generation Z communicate digitally more than in person. In the UK, the figure was 74.4 per cent and in the US 73.7 per cent.

Technology experts said that the new Google app would prove a hit with that market.

Jacob Turner, barrister and author of Robot Rules, Regulating Artificial Intelligence, said: “The robo-caller program demonstrates the potential for AI technology to have a profound effect on the way that we interact with each other. These tech-driven shifts in social relations are not new. When telephones were invented, voice calling replaced typed or handwritten letters. Now we are seeing another technology pushing in the other direction.”

Professor Gina Neff, senior research fellow & associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, said: “We should never underestimate the creativity of young people when they’re using technology.

“They find really humorous, silly ways to use this new kind of way to communicate.”

Live Relay is still in the research phase, but Google said it was working to bring it to an operating system update in the future.

Consumers’ phone habits have changed in the last decade and most are now hungry for data instead of “minutes” or “texts” on mobile plans.

With more data-heavy applications like Snapchat, Whatsapp, Signal and Facebook Messenger and the trend for sending quick videos, it is a trend that is expected to continue, with telecommunication providers banking on incoming 5G technology.