This is just ushering in the end of voice calling entirely. Not too much longer now.
Alternatively, one day Apple will add a service to prevent this in a simple way, turn it on by default, and overnight the entire industry will be dead.
It’s funny, I remember when the iPhone was announced Steve Jobs said “the killer app is making calls!” and then proceeded to show (correctly at the time) how hard making calls with phones was, and how much better it was going to be.
And now? I literally don’t use this feature.
I turn on Do Not Disturb and “block unknown callers”, and turn on emergency-mode for anyone I actually care about, and receive no other rings on my phone. At this point, I refuse to spend even a moment considering any call that does not leave a voice mail.
This is AWESOME and I can't wait for Apple to hopefully build their own version as well.
But at the same time, I can't help but wonder if representatives will actually stay on the line to wait for you.
If you're accidentally on mute or they don't hear you, sometimes they'll hang up very quickly, within just a few seconds. (Not always though.)
I hope that because it'll play a message for them instructing them to wait for you, they'll wait... but I also assume they'll set an internal policy on how long they're allowed to. Will it be 30 seconds? 15 seconds? 60 seconds?
Voice calls, the worst part of a phone. Out of anything pub-sub it really has to be the worst medium in many aspects. Long gone are the polyphonic ringtones that tried to inspire answering, now I only see vibrating or blinking phones.
So, instead of ignoring the annoying spoofed/hidden caller, I now have to answer (to try and figure out who is calling me), waste time, try calling back to see if they'll remove me from list, and if not submit forms to FCC in the hopes the FCC can/will do anything?
I'm pretty close to the point where I just leave the ringer on my phone off permanently. If somebody calls and I want to speak to them, I'll eventually call back. This sucks because I do speak to my parents on the phone, so we end up playing a lot of phone-tag trying to reach each other.
My final and unfortunate solution for this was to stop accepting phone calls altogether. Friends/relatives know to use Skype and IM, all important stuff goes to voicemail, everything else is on permanent mute and ignore. I wonder if it is the case for more and more people.
I would mostly disable my inbound calling capability altogether if I could. There is just ever so slightly more than zero benefit to receiving voice phone calls.
I don't answer the phone anymore. I don't think I ever did to begin with. I hate phones. I have a subscription because it's impossible to get mobile internet without it and nearly all mobile software uses phone numbers for identification and authentication. Wish I could turn off the calls. I don't want people to call me! I want people to message me. It used to be easy to ignore. Now with all these automated calls the system has become unusable and unbearable. Every single day I get at least 5 automated calls and my phone always thinks they're the most important things in the world, worthy of my immediate attention and warranting the interruption of anything I'm doing. It makes me wish I could delete the telephony app without breaking the phone!
That's what phones are, most fundamentally. They're human interrupts. When I call people, I'm interrupting them in order to make them talk to me. There's this underlying assumption that the call is more important than anything. People will ignore other humans in front of them in order to answer calls! Hard to think of anything more disrespectful. That may have been tolerable back then when phones were the best technology we had but they've been obsolete ever since asynchronous messaging became a thing. Why can't phones just disappear? What's keeping them alive?
I have lots of family with landlines. Older people who still think of phone lines as something valuable just because they used to be worth a ton of money decades ago. 95%+ of the calls they receive are nothing but a waste of their time. Banks offering them credit cards, loans, scammers. Yet they keep those lines around "just in case"! I simply can't fathom putting up with an advertiser who's brash enough to actually interrupt me with a phone call. That's an unfathomable level of abuse to me.
What a crock. You can silence unknown numbers. Not to mention that nobody said you'd be forced to use this feature.
If an emergency happens with my parents, they're going to CALL ME. And the fact that I won't know about it if I happen to be in the shower or down the hall doing laundry or working outside for a few minutes is absurd and stupid.
Unbelievable that anyone would argue against this obvious OPTIONAL function, which has been present on telephonic devices for decades. Apple's handheld Unix computer/phone is the first I've had without it... and the one with the least excuse.
What a dumb argument. As I already pointed out, this is a feature that was standard for years on EXISTING PHONES and other products, which Apple "forgot." In the modern world, it is expected that if you call someone, they will be notified. Why on earth should someone have to call every few minutes until he "gets through?"
Do you think this is the '50s, where someone tells the operator "Keep trying!"
Not to mention, this is an OPTION, one that Apple already added for TEXTS. Why is it OK for texts, but not phone calls? Are you similarly outraged over the option for texts?
Same thing with my Android phone. When I am in an area without internet access, but phone-calling signal (at least) the dumb ass phone defaults to using an internal low-quality OK-Google speech recognition. So instead of looking up hours to a nearby restaurant I look at my phone and it is suddenly calling someone in my contact list (that I haven't really talked to in years)... and of course since the speech recognition blasted the CPU's horsepower, nothing on the screen is responsive and my thumbs are constantly slamming the screen with no feedback - the calls goes through for about a second or ringing before my phone decide to hang up fully.
Android has a similar feature in its Do Not Disturb mode. If you're not already in my address book, my phone simply does not ring. Everyone I need to hear from on a moment's notice is in there, and everyone else can leave a voicemail. It's maybe a bit sad that it's come to this, but the robocalls are rampant and this is the only solution that even puts a dent in the volume.
Also reminds me of all the skepticism surrounding the iPhone launch. I remember those joke ad spoofs making fun of the actual phone feature. Yet here we are and who uses actual voice calls anymore?
My least favorite thing about PagerDuty is the phone call notification. I drive a car from 2001, and with a cheap bluetooth upgrade, I can do all of these with my voice while driving:
- Get directions to anywhere on the continent
- Send and receive texts to my friends
- Answer and take a call from a human
But if PagerDuty calls me, Stephen Hawking's speech synthesizer brusquely yells at me and demands I take my hands off the wheel and press a button on my phone to acknowledge the alert. No voice recognition, no ability to kick off an automated play. It's a time portal to 1997! Even the _banks_ have friendlier phone automation these days!
Did the author ever try just not using headphones or other smart/connected devices to take the call?
Misclick and end the call? Call back.
Rushing and can't take the call without headphones, let it go to voicemail and call back when you can.
We have agency and autonomy. We don't have to use all the tech we have all the time. Everything around a phone call has 'progressive enhancement' from the bones up. That also means we can easily toss out all that 'enhancement' and be left with the same basic feature set.
Like everyone I sometimes fumble around with my headphones if they don't auto connect and its frustrating but its not a big deal. But far more often than not everything works well for me - starting the call on my watch and moving to my phone as I look for it, starting on my phone and moving to my headphones, starting and staying on my phone.
Alternatively, one day Apple will add a service to prevent this in a simple way, turn it on by default, and overnight the entire industry will be dead.
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