Before we begin, let's understand a bit about what voicemail is, and when it was at its peak.
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Voicemail is a system, controlled by a computer in which phone subscribers and users can send and receive voice messages. The transactions which were processed by voicemail include the likes of organizations, products, individuals, and services - and used ordinary telephones in most cases.
Most calling machines in the United States and the West (which created and popularised the concept of voicemail) had a facility to listen to voicemail. The voicemail was at its peak during the late 80s right till the mid-2000s and had a large user base. However, the idea of responding to an automatic voice message never caught on in India for some reason.
Years later, post the advent of the internet, voicemail seems to have lost some of its popularity in the West as well but had they managed to capture India, they would have been able to cut margins cheap international calls and stay relevant. India, however, is psychologically much different from the West - from the way we use telephones to the way we communicate, and all this played a major role in ensuring voicemail never took off.
Here are a few reasons:
While most households in India owned a fully-functional telephone in the 80s and 90s, they never really had the facility to hold voicemails. The BSNL and MTNL devices were capable of making and receiving calls, but not voicemails. Even when cordless phones arrived with the ability to facilitate voicemails , the fact that cordless phones were imported meant that not everybody had them.
Only a select few would have the power to make and receive voicemails. This restricted the audience set to just a few tens of thousands. Voicemail companies never understood the reason behind this lack of interest, and by the time they did, the internet had already begun taking over as a source of communication.
Indians also, were alien to this concept of automated voicemails, and in most cases, they wouldn't need a reason to even send one - they love missed calls.
If there's one country that can stake a claim for being the pioneers of the missed call, it's India, hands down. While Indians who had cordless devices could send or receive voice messages, they never really wanted to. A simple missed call would show up on the receiver's screen - and save money for the caller. A voicemail would instead charge a rupee, and a lot of people felt even that was a simple waste of money.
This etiquette pretty much sounded the death knell for the voicemail in India. Indians believed calling someone back when the screen displayed their missed call, was a priority, not a choice. A lot of Indians could directly call back after, and the case would be closed then. Besides, why waste a rupee when a missed call gets the same message across for free?
However, funnily enough, the concept of missed calls is not in use and considered rude in the West. The next time you're calling an American friend, make sure you leave him a voicemail instead of the missed call. They just might hit you with the, "Why didn't you leave a voicemail?" dialogue.
The thing about most households with a cordless phone is that they could more often than not, afford domestic help. Indians love living as large families under one roof, and domestic help would always be around to tend to any needs. Even in the rare event that all the family members weren't at home, the domestic help would always be at hand to pick up the device and relay the message to the caller.
While this may not have been the most significant of factors, there is no doubt that it played a part as well. Families in the West generally do not have caretakers who stay at home and tend to the household. Messages go directly to the voice mail, and that is how the culture sprung up over there.
India's varied cultural idiosyncrasies played such a vital part in isolating voicemails and ensuring they never really had a chance here. As a country, we are very informal with our communication, and this is why the missed call was our most sought after mode. With time, voice mails did garner a bit of popularity, but even then it was handed another blow by the internet and internet-calls which acted as a voicemail solution.
Also, India's "joint-family" culture ensured that there was always someone at home - the little kid enjoying his holidays, the older couple who spent a lot of time indoors or even the domestic help who cleaned up every day and was treated as another part of the family. These factors played a big role and ensured India never really felt the need for a voicemail.
While voicemail today is pretty much redundant, millennial culture has affirmed that internet calling is the way forward. Companies like Kirusa provide a suite of voice-activated and internet-powered voice services that trumps technology such as voicemail.
The world has gotten a lot closer owing to social media, apps such as WhatsApp and Skype and so much more. They made communication easier with the help of notifications that alert users. Voicemail never stood a chance in India and in a way, it was India's own aversion to spending money on services they never felt they wanted which eliminated it.
How big is the new iphone 4G screen
With apple acceptable to barrage its new iPhone 4G at next week's Worldwide Developer's Conference, as the aggregation has done for the accomplished for three summers, belief is aggressive about what new appearance ability appear that haven't been apparent in two leaked prototypes.
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among the added questions to be answered if Jobs, as expected, releases the iPhone 4G at apple's WWDC Monday in San Francisco is, if it is altered from the prototypes apparent by the world, will it accept a active rather than touchscreen keyboard -- a affection that text-happy iPhone users accept pined for?
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a reverse-engineered iPhone 4G ancestor that appeared on a Vietnamese tech website acclimated an apple-branded one-gigahertz a4 processor, which admiral the iPad. Dell's Streak tablet/smartphone hybrid, aswell appear Friday in the United Kingdom, has a five-inch screen . Jobs could aswell accomplish some big account by advertisement a CDMa-compatible adaptation of the iPhone -- absurd back apple has been aboveboard loyal to aT&T as its absolute U.S. carrier, admitting appear arrangement problems.