Voice Note Recording County

Last week I spent a decent amount of my Friday night recording a voice note. I’m not going to dive into the specifics of why this happened. What’s important is that I was distracted from the first episode of Severance because I was making sure I crafted the right message after an already very tiring week.

Voice notes are a weird feature. One of my least favorite parts of the experience is if someone sends you a voice note, once you listen to it, it disappears unless you choose to save it. I’m not sure why this was the technical approach Apple decided to roll with, but what’s done is done.

Given how much nuance and care some people put into recording voice notes, I wondered what it might look like for the recipient to have some visibility. What if a user could see how many times a voice note was re-recorded before sending?

There are interesting ripple effects if this feature is made. If someone sees a bunch of time being wasted, maybe they’d just do a phone call instead. Alternatively, maybe they’ll be a bit less precious about the notes they make. I can see why Apple doesn’t do this, but it’d be fun to see a world where they did, at least for a bit.

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