Looking Forward to Voice Texts in iOS 8

I’m excited that iOS 8 is dropping for everyone tomorrow, as it means more people I talk to will have the ability to use voice texts.

If you’re not familiar, it’s a way in iOS 8 to send a short clip of voice rather than typing (or doing dictation which records you then turns your words into text). You can think of it as a walky talkie feature, except built right into your native texting app.

This is why they call it Messages and not Texts, I imagine: it’s designed to do short bursts of communication, and the mode doesn’t matter. With this we’re getting closer to unified communication, which I find fascinating.

I was using Voxer with a few friends for a while, and really enjoyed it, so I’m happy to see it built into the OS.

Here are another few upgrades to Messages in iOS 8:

• Sending content to people is far simpler and faster. You can also send multiple things at once

• You can do the same "send instantly from Messages" thing with video

• You can to see where the person you are talking to is, right from the message you’re in

• If you’re not sharing location information with them, you can share (and request sharing) right there for an hour, the day, or permanently. This feature is brilliant when trying to coordinate a meetup with someone

• Group messaging is massively improved in multiple ways

• Instantly see all attachments from a conversation

iOS 8 is overall just a stellar OS upgrade, but the updates to Messages are going to be among those felt most significantly.

For those that I text with regularly, let’s see if we can get some productivity out of the voice feature.