The phone is dead. Long live… Long live what exactly? It has often been said and written that the smartphone ended up burying the digital organizer, camera, alarm clock…and now it threatens the very existence of the phone.
It’s crazy what can happen in a month’s time in the tech world. Between May and June, Apple and Google, which constitute the global mobile phone monopoly with the iPhone and Android platform, presented the novelties that they intend to add to their mobile devices over the next year.
For people who like to spend hours on the phone, the news is not good. For people who are anxiously awaiting a call after leaving a message in voicemail for their loved ones, things are looking bad. For telemarketing professionals too. At least those, no one will regret not talking to them anymore…
Read out loud
Apple has just spent a few days offering programmers and creators of all kinds of applications the new features that are coming to many of its computer products. The iPhone has its fair share of new features. Most of them target the three main communication functions of the device.
“Phone calls, messages, and FaceTime video calls get a lot of new features in this update that users are going to love,” Apple software magnate Craig Federighi said onstage. “We hope to make iPhone more personalized and intuitive than ever before.”
One way to personalize your mobile experience is to add a large photo of you (or any other photo, for that matter) to your contact card and write your name on it by choosing from a selection of fonts and colors intended to make the way we appear on people’s screen Who we call is unique.
The person on the other end of the line (or wireless?) will see all of this when they pick it up. She can respond, verbally or with a text message, or transfer the call to voicemail.
This is where it gets interesting: If you leave a message in voicemail, the iPhone will offer to relay what the caller has recorded in writing, and will pass it on to the user so they can read it, all with a clear head. No need to put your ear to the phone to receive messages. In fact, you don’t even need to answer calls anymore: leave a voice message after the beep, and we’ll read it later…
Your call is important to us
Apple is not inventing anything with this new functionality. Google has been offering pretty much the same thing for several months on select Android devices, including the latest version of its Pixel line of phones. However, in both cases, the functionality is limited to the English language. To take advantage of this, you have to set your phone’s language to English, of course, but the remaining messages in your voicemail should also be in English. We are assured, at both Apple and Google, that transcriptions of voicemails and even live calls in other languages - including French – will be offered as soon as possible.
However, Google takes automatic call handling a step further to make the experience less painful. Perhaps that’s why so many people are so eager to trust automated tools to manage live voice conversations: because they’re not as fun as we used to think.
On Google’s part, we seem to have understood that some calls are more annoying than others. For example, when we are suspended. Your call is important to us, and we are very much reassured before replaying the same mediocre song in particular, but royalty-free for the umpteenth time. Imagine if she additionally had an earworm…
So Google Assistant offers to keep the line for us. When someone on the other end picks up, the phone emits an audible or vibrating alert. We can return to the call without losing a few minutes of a busy life that is much better elsewhere than in the virtual waiting room of a multinational company that is in no rush to speak to us in person.
Google Assistant can also reply to us. It comes in handy when you don’t recognize the number (or soon, the big full-screen profile picture with the name in color…). So we can assign the helper the task of picking up and asking who is calling. You can then decide to answer in person or pass by.
How to turn off your phone
If you’re on Android, you can also customize your wallpaper a little more later this year. If your phone is new enough, you can put it on a charging stand and leave its display on to see it transform into a dynamic photo frame, digital organizer, alarm clock, video call peripheral, etc… The same thing will be possible on this iPhone autumn.
It will suddenly be nice to leave your phone on your desk or on your bedside table instead of putting it to your ear … Because even if we are still talking about a smartphone today, the telephony function of these pocket computers seems to be less important.
