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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.