“I respect the fact that most people are like, ‘I don’t want to have to stop and listen to you talk for three minutes or whatever. And it’s hard to discreetly send a voice note if you’re in a meeting or at work. They can be tedious to listen to if they’re too long or rambling, which can happen a lot. There are downsides to voice messages, though. “It gives me anxiety to think I’m going to catch someone at a bad time with a call,” said Hannah Ayla, a 30-year-old graphic designer in Tampa, Florida, who says voice messages “saved her relationships” when she was dealing with chronic pain in her arm and unable to text. More broadly, voice memos are popular because they allow people to share the richness that comes with voice communication, like tone, mood, and humor - without the pressure of inconveniencing someone with a phone call. As an example, she said she recently used the feature to give a friend the rundown about a date she’d just gone on, because it was easier to “hash it out” than via text. “I find it to be a lot more personal than a text.”ĭierks said voice messages have exploded in popularity on her college campus in the past year. “I use voice messages every single day,” Kennedy Dierks, a 21-year-old student at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, told me. Some are even communicating more with voice messages than texts, according to WhatsApp’s head of consumer product, Zafir Khan. WhatsApp said last year that over 7 billion voice messages are sent on the app every day. Younger people are using voice messaging even more, with some 43 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds who responded to the survey saying that they use the feature at least weekly. 62 percent of Americans say they’ve sent a voice message, and around 30 percent communicate this way weekly, daily, or multiple times a day, according to a random sample poll of 1,000 US adults by YouGov run for Vox. Maybe you’ve noticed: Lately, they’re popping up in more group chats and one-on-one conversations.

Voice messages, sometimes called “voice notes” or “voice texts,” are short audio recordings people send to each other (not to be confused with voicemail) and a built-in feature in popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, and Telegram. In a world where we’re overloaded with texts, anxiety-ridden about phone calls, and fatigued by video chats, many people are turning to another form of communication: voice messages.

Who won the voice last year