FB’s messaging service comes with another “feature” you hinted at but didn’t name: ubiquitous surveillance. And you worry about the nudie-scanners at airports?

As for voicemail-to-text, NSA has been working on continuous speech transcription at least since the late 1970s that I know of, is typically 10 years ahead of civilian tech at everything they touch, and even today still requires rooms full of humans to edit the output of the machine into recognizable words. Think of trying to design OCR for cursive handwriting and you’re kinda’ on the right track.

But you can be sure that Google and now FB will optimize their speech recognition systems for the words for *things* you can *buy* from their *advertisers*, most of which have the result of increasing your *carbon footprint*. Progress?

If someone doesn’t want to listen to the sound of human voices leaving them messages, and prefers to read everything as text, I have a very simple solution for them. Change your outgoing voicemail message to something like the following:

“Hi this is Bob. I don’t listen to voice messages so don’t leave a message here. Please send me a text message of 200 characters or less including your email address and/or phone number. Thank you.”

This is a really interesting case of social devolution at work.

Audio quality on the telephone peaked in the mid 1990s. After that, with increasing penetration of cellphones, it went to hell in a handbasket. The technical name of that handbasket is G.729, which edits out most of the subtleties of tone, rhythm, and inflection that convey emotional data. (This is why cellphone driving is dangerous: your brain has to devote more CPU to deciphering G.729 into intelligible speech.)

Now people don’t talk into ergonomically-designed handsets with high quality audio fidelity, they talk into devices roughly the shape of candy bars that do a little of everything poorly, and sound like crap. (That these devices sparkle and shine and make pretty pictures, appeals to the chimpanzee instinct to grasp at anything “shiny and new.”)

So it’s no surprise that they would rather do text than voice: at least they don’t have to keep asking “what did you just say?” and “hello, are you there?” while reading their text messages.

There’s a word for this too.

It’s called the T-E-L-E-G-R-A-P-H.

If we keep going at this rate, in about 90 years, human speech will be reduced to “eeep eeep!” and “ooop ooop!” and the like, but most of the time people will just poke at each other to get each others’ attention. And then they’ll make faces. In between the stream of ads.

Supposedly I can do texting for free now that I have a google voice account. But I just email.

i sure ain’t gonna guzzle a 6 pack of the stuff.

p.s. at least they aren’t all watching t.v.

Very scary. I can see a large increase in the need for vitamin D in the near future for these cave dwellers.

I’m not as “connected” as many people I know – but my students can reach me by email whether I’m at a computer or only have my phone; my family can text me (and do), even when I’m at the Nature Center hiking and taking pictures. At times it is useful, but more often an annoyance. I really doubt I’ll use this new facebook feature: any idea who will?