VOICE OF THE VOICELESS

The results of my voice survey are in, and they're fairly striking: of the 317 who took the poll, about 69% said they activated voice just occasionally, or not at all.  So adoption remains fairly small.  Then again, 31% who do use voice often so soon after its introduction is not an insignificant percentage.  If Gwyn is right, the constant crush of new users who accept voice as a standard feature will increase that percentage in coming years.  My guess, however, is that the "Sometimes Yes/No" will be the categories that increase, with voice becoming more popular for specific events, but remain less so for regular use.  Will check back next year, to see who's right.

Comments

[dandellion]

Just as we thought, all the loud pro-voice voices were part of campaign. Yes, voice is a feature that many iwll use, that can bring some benefit to the world, but is far from LL wanted us to believe.

[Gillian]

Not shocking at all...I use voice in IM but very rarely outside of that and if you read the official forums (counts as a bit of a gauge, no?) then this is exactly what people have been saying for months and months. No surprise.

[eggy lippmann]

Of course most people don't use it, most people don't use voice chat outside SL either :P

[skribe Forti]

I use it whenever I can. Unfortunately the people I talk with the most it still crashes their machines. Still for me, it's a tremendous boon to my business.

[Anony Mouse]

Think about it this way....

How many people do you know who use Yahoo Messenger or MSN with voice?

I don't. None of my friends do.

Voice implies isolation. When I use Skype or, even when I'm on the phone, I like silence in the room around me.

I live with other people and asking them to be out of the room for the length of a phone call is fine, but asking them to be out of the room for the length of a session on SL is unreasonable.

Also, I prefer text.

There are still text based chat programs...
IRC still exists...
etc
etc
etc

Voice will not replace text. Text is simply more in keeping with the spirit of what SL is about.

Sure, there will always be "voice bigots." But you'll find that they were always there. They are the ones who have their skype address in their first life section... or have their FL picture in the SL tab.

There have been other polls... and they've born out the same results. 60-70 percent of people won't use it. I would expect that to remain the same for a long time.

At any rate, those who don't use it will still have the power. Whereas voice is optional, text chat is not. Everyone has it and there's no way to block it.

I, personally, will have voice disabled forever. If someone wants to talk to me, they will need to do it via text. If they want to talk about me behind my back... well, they could already have done that with skype so I'm not too worried about that.

Anony Mouse
"Up your if you don't like it."

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

I guess that my prediction was indeed off the mark... but I forgot to take into account a very important issue: I assumed that voice would work flawlessly in SL (ie. Skype-quality, both in sound as in service).

Obviously, that was very naive thinking :) Of course, this is SL, where most things don't work "flawlessly". In fact, voice works surprisingly well some of the times (just like SL does, indeed, work surprisingly well some of the times). It doesn't work most of the time — sometimes with hilarious effects like squeaks and huge distortion on the sound, feedback, droning/humming — but very often, well, you don't even get a connection to the voice servers, and that's it.

Even for the voice fans (and I know a number of those!) this was a very painful experience for them, who have been dreaming about it for months and months, and now are terribly frustrated that it simply doesn't work like they imagined it. Or rather, the frustration comes from seeing that i t works just like they imagined it — for a very short time :) So, no wonder voice is being far less used than even I predicted, although, to be honest, I'm really looking at a long-term prediction — one where 90% of all users in SL have registered to SL and gone through the voice setup wizard as if it were the most normal thing of the world (which it will be for them).

I just smile and go back to text chat... even with chat lag :)

And Anony, point taken. I've actually just tried voice once on iChat and my roomie tried once under Gtalk. Nobody else in my circle of acquaintances, friends, or family, have ever used voice in Yahoo/MSN/iChat/Gtalk again. Still, quite a lot of them use Skype every day...