Text Messaging Featured Article

Each communications medium has its advantage. The main advantage of speech is speed, and the fact that most of us are better talkers than writers. But listening to speech is much slower than reading words on a page. If all of my voicemails were transcribed to text, for instance, I would probably be a heck of a lot better at responding to voicemail.

So, naturally, the ability to convert speech to text has its advantages: It mixes fast message creation (speech) with fast message consumption (text). This, in essence, is the value proposition of the new speech-to-text feature that Facebook (News - Alert) is testing for its Facebook Messenger app.

The social media giant is only trying out speech-to-text with a few users at the moment, according to Facebook VP of messaging products David Marcus (News - Alert), but when they have it right, the company plans to make it available more widely.

This kind of feature is not just a clever idea for Facebook, however. Speech-to-text has a number of useful applications for businesses too. For instance, if you needed to send a message to someone who was in a meeting, speech-to-text would be much preferred over a traditional voice message. The recipient could see the text message on the sly, unlike with a voice message.

It also is just plain more efficient for those of us with crushing workloads; as much as I enjoy hearing messages delivered by voice, I’m much faster as scanning text for important information.

There are other speech-to-text services, of course; Google (News - Alert) Voice transcribes voicemail that is recorded through the service, for instance. But in the case of Facebook Messenger, the conversion is happening with what essentially is a chat application.

With transcribed voicemail, there still is the expectation that the response will come by way of voice; you still call the person back, even if you “read” their voicemail message. But if the converted voicemail comes by way of a chat client, responding with text would be more of a viable and expected response.

This all further blurs the line between chat, text and telephone calls. It will be interesting to see if competing solutions follow, and how widely the new functionality is used when it makes it past the testing stage.