There are great debates dividing society. Consoles vs PC, omelet with or without onions, pizza with or without pineapple, summer or winter, beach or mountains… These are topics and discussions that generally have no middle ground. Since then, bollistas will never agree with concebollistas beyond a timid “let’s see, if there’s nothing else, I’ll eat it”.

Such discussions also occur in Xataka, but we have never experienced them before. stances are too far Like this week’s topic: WhatsApp sounds.

Let’s talk about WhatsApp sounds

The other day, based on the leak that WhatsApp was working on a function to transcribe audio, we had a heated discussion in the newsroom, with each man expressing his own position. There are true audio fans on Xataka, as well as staunch advocates of written text. Below we examine the position of Xataka editors, but first of all, We invite you to use the comments to tell us your opinions. and open this melon.

Sounds yes, thank you

Since some of our colleagues love audio recordings, we believed that the best way for them to defend their arguments was of course audio recording.

No sound please

After listening to four minutes of argument in favor of undoubtedly having a global vision of this article, we take the opposing position. In summary, it can be said that if sounds are useful to the sender in terms of the urgency of communication, They are the exact opposite of the receiver..

The voice implies listening and, if we talk about a long voice, a certain dedication. Speaking of sound bite, as Javier Pastor points out, “what is normal is that everything you say in a message [de voz] You can say this in a short message. For me, voice notes are almost like SPAM that the person in question is forcing me to swallow.” Rubén agrees with Andrés: “The problem is that receiving a voice prompts you to listen to it and behave in the same way as it. a call. telephone”.

Xataka’s colleague Alberto de la Torre considers the audio recordings to be “hijackings”. According to him, “When they’re short, they can easily be replaced with a text message. When they’re long, they’re not urgent, because that’s what calls are made for.”

This is a point around which the counter-argument revolves. Listening to voices takes time, maybe when we don’t have or simply, we don’t want to commit. And it’s not because the content isn’t interesting (which it may be), but as our colleague Carlos Prego puts it, “texts are often shorter, clearer, and better structured than audio recordings.”

According to Prego, when typing “it’s harder to move around while typing letters on the screen than when you have a microphone that picks up the first thing that comes to your mind. Unless you’re communicating with a BBC announcer, it’s probably going to be harder.” The recording reaches you full of anacolutos, digressions and perhaps even words that are not fully understood. Jose García, a presenter, thinks along the same lines.

This image was conveyed to us by a colleague from Xataka and is completely real.

From my perspective WhatsApp voices are selfish. They allow the speaker to go off topic and improvise, fill the sound with “eeee”, “mmm” and the occasional sneeze, the beep of a car on the street or the sound of the wind, why not, and this forces me to listen to it. Not to mention that every mobile phone is different and the microphones may not be the best. There’s nothing worse than listening to recorded audio through cheap wireless headphones in a noisy environment.

Another thing to consider is whether the text allows cross-reading. César Muela believes that “as a receiver, listening takes longer than reading, even if you speed up the sounds”; An argument also put forward by Laura Sacristán: “Read-across is much faster than having to endure a few minutes of a podcast. And it’s less intrusive, so it doesn’t force you to wear headphones or hold your mobile phone to your ear.”

Finally, voicemails have one major problem: These are not “searchable”. If we talk only about WhatsApp, we can go back to the first message in history by simply remembering a word in the message through the search engine. If you search for “I love,” you might find, for example, that you wrote “I love you” to your partner for the first time. Now, if communication is based on sounds, we will have to search history, listen completely to all the sounds, and with luck we will find what we are looking for.

No matter what, I believe Javier Jiménez will give us the key. Unfortunately it’s pro-audio, so you know what to do.

Image | Xataka

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