My group chat has spoken: death to texting

There’s something about hearing the voice of a woman long dead that might well give you shivers. It feels like a portal to the past. Especially when you hear her English trill say, clear as a bell despite being recorded on a scratchy phonograph in 1890: “When I am no longer a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life.” Then she announces her name, so that listeners of the then magical new technology would know who spoke: Florence Nightingale.

You don’t have to be a student of history to feel awestruck by the audio, and feel like the famed nurse is in the room. In a very real sense, she is: Her voice is vibrating against your walls, through your eardrums, in a way that no handwritten document can replicate.

No wonder, at a time when the average smartphone user spends some seven hours a day on their screen, when talk has been subsumed by GIFs, emojis, and text-speak, that people are starting to yearn for something that makes them feel as strongly: voice communications. Just like the Slow Food movement of the late 1980s found fame worldwide among people tired of artificial fast food, audio is helping people to slow down the way they chat, and enjoy communication as a ritual, not a means to an end.

I’m ecstatically on board with this. I live in Singapore but maintain a long-running WhatsApp group chat with old college friends from the UK. A few months ago, one of them, Matt, suggested a challenge: We each send a voice note once a week. His highly British rationale: “It’s both more personal and less hassle than writing a big-arse message.” As soon as we started, we were all surprised by how meaningful the ritual became. Every time I (literally) hear from the gang, it feels like we’re not 37, but 19 again, laughing in our Dickensian student flat. Fran’s habit of breaking into song midsentence, Kat’s low chuckle, the background clink of cutlery from an English pub — they all communicate far more than any emoji or even an essay-length text.

Voice memos have become more than communications; they’re meditations.

Things quickly got competitive as we tried to one-up our recording times. My initial four-minute piddler was quickly bested by missives doubling that length. But what I love most is how live they feel. “Just recording this on a train,” one person will say, while another monologue might be interrupted by someone tripping over their cat, or peering into their fridge to decide what’s for dinner. All mundane, slice-of-life filler — and yet the very essence of life — that we’d never even think to text. The fluff is the good stuff, the relationship glue that you want to hear about in a world urging us to always optimize. These voice memos have become more than communications; they’re meditations, useful ways to get things off my chest.

Even so, just starting the habit felt odd, at a time when most of us are constantly on our phones but can’t stand making phone calls. It felt like being asked to tap-dance in a waiting room. As someone who writes for a living, I value the keyboard as a canvas to blurt, then brutally edit, my words to within an inch of their life before I dare hit send. Faced with the “hold to record” button in my group chat, I white-knuckled my way through a short monologue. My words doubled back on themselves, I lost my train of thought, said “umm” twice every sentence — and therein lies the point, I soon realized. Its rawness made it real. My and my friends’ speech had the rarest of qualities today: unfiltered.

Texting “prioritizes speed and convenience over depth and warmth,” says Mary Chayko, a sociologist and professor at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information. The retro appeal of “talk tech” can “help us connect to the source of the voice in a deeper, more personal way,” she adds. “There are layers and levels to the human voice that simply cannot be found in text, no matter how elegantly constructed.”

Even as we turn to the century-old balm of voices crackling through the airwaves, technology is changing our relationship with the human voice. In just a few clicks, you can now bring dead loved ones back to life, provided you have a snippet recording of them. “Prepare a recording of the dead person you want to clone in advance,” says the eerily cheery four-step how-to for the app VidNoz AI. Within moments, the marketing copy touts, “you can hear the voices of your elders again, or your grieving children can hear their loved ones tell them stories.”

Chayko is skeptical. She argues that even a near-perfect clone can never replicate the imperfect warmth of a real loved one’s voice. It’s like the difference between a real Van Gogh portrait and a perfect fake — the latter will always feel fraudulent to those who know it’s a copy. “In fact, the closer the cloned voice may be to the original, the more unsatisfying and disturbing it will be,” Chayko says. After all, the more an AI voice sounds like Grandma, the more we are reminded that Grandma will never be in the room with us again.

But for the most vulnerable demographics, even a machine-generated voice can offer surprising solace. All over the world, lonely older people turn to apps like Alexa, Google Home, or ElliQ for companionship. “If the voice makes us feel something, it can absolutely take on some of the qualities of a real relationship,” says Chayko. Unreal as these voices may be, their parasocial or what Chayko calls “sociomental” effect is undeniable. “We know that we are not sharing a physical experience with them, but we can still come to care about them, even a great deal,” she says.

Lesson learned: if you want to hook up, speak up.

Meanwhile, younger generations are combating loneliness with talk tech in even more immediate ways. At the height of pandemic lockdowns, Hinge introduced two simple remedies for dating at a distance. Voice Prompts allows you to send potential paramours a 30-second sample of your dulcet tones, based on a list of prompts like sharing “your best dad joke.” And Voice Notes let matches flirt voice to voice, like the good old days. Hinge says both have been a resounding success. “We’ve found that voice features are a secret ingredient for sparking connections,” a Hinge spokesperson tells me. “In 2024, conversations with Voice Notes were 40% more likely to lead to a date, and people who added a Voice Prompt to their profile were 32% more likely to go on a date.” Other dating apps like Tinder and Bumble have also added voice features. Lesson learned: If you want to hook up, speak up.

Anna Davis, a British teacher at an international school in Singapore, tells me she’s found the recordings from potential matches on dating apps a mixed bag. “Somebody was once singing ‘Aladdin,’ you know, ‘I can show you the wooooorld’ — a really cringe version,” she tells me. Most users who make recordings are guys, she says. Since women are likely to get hit on anyway, it seems less necessary for them to record a flirty clip. But listening to a recording could be a useful acid test, to help judge whether a guy feels genuine before meeting IRL.

Different nationalities present themselves differently in front of the microphone too, Davis notes. “Americans are very in your face, and seem very put on, talking about how great they are,” while “Brits are generally quite jokey,” she says. “Singaporeans normally just talk about the things they like to do in their spare time.”

Others are even less enamored with voice notes. Erica Wong, a founder of a content consultancy who has worked with tech brands such as Google and X, finds them too time-consuming and impractical. But ask her about another retro talk tool, and she lights up. “For me, dictation is my default way of composing written messages because I’ve become progressively impatient with typing,” she says. Wong now “types” both work and personal messages and emails with her voice.

Voice notes may also be particularly attractive to certain cultures. Wong, who has Chinese heritage, notes that her mother’s generation is a big fan, as a recording negates the fiddly need to type out Chinese characters on a small keyboard. And soon, Wong shares, her family will be starting a project with audio at its heart. “My family and I have just arranged to do a series of voice interviews with our 60- to 80-year-old aunts and uncles as a way to document their memories and stories, in case we ever want to write a book, or confirm something in our family history.” Recorded by relatives around the world and stored on a shared drive, the clan audio will serve as a living archive.

This urge to document and preserve our voices is not one that will fade away anytime soon. There are countless online forums of people desperate to recover voicemails of relatives who have just died. And every year on the anniversary of 9/11, people across the world listen to the voicemail Brian Sweeney left his wife minutes before his plane flew into the South Tower. His final words offer a poignant reminder for us all to drop the texts, and do what has grown to feel so unnatural — connect through our voices: “Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have good times. Same to my parents and everybody, and I just totally love you, and I’ll see you when you get there. Bye, babe. I hope I call you.”

I’d seen articles about Sweeney, but had never bothered to listen. Now that I’ve heard the crackle of the line and the calmness in his voice, I’m reminded again about Florence Nightingale. Will my and my family’s voices be heard in the next century? Probably not — but I’m still going to suggest that we drop each other a recording now and then, especially when we’re apart. There’s nothing like feeling like your loved one is in the room with you.

Daniel Seifert is a freelance writer. He lives in Singapore.

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