READER SURVEY: VOICES AND CHOICES

And so voice has arrived, and when you now enter the world, you're presented with the option to speak, or not to speak.  A few months ago, I asked readers whether they thought voice communication would be broadly adopted.  Now I'm asking what each of you do, when given the choice.  Not what you think or hope you'll do in the future, but what you're doing right now:

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Survey runs until next Friday!

Comments

[Cyn Vandeverre]

I think that many island owners are waiting for the shoe to drop about the extra fees they'll be charged, come January. I'm going to be trying it out, but it remains to be seen if my Land Baron (or his constituents) will think it's worth the fees.

[Nightbird Glineux]

I voted "No." Is that correct, considering I'm boycotting upgrades from client 1.18.0.6?

[Cubey Terra]

I don't think the question is whether people will enable voice -- I think almost everyone will want to do that just to hear the voice conversations around them.

The question should be... "Do you plan to use a microphone?"

[Murmish Skolem]

If you have a look at the avatars of most people who are in SL for longer you will see that most of them are quite perfect. So are all the cool places. One of the nice things about SL is that you can configure your outward appeariance to what ever is perfect for you. Same with your places. So the use of your own unperfect voice would bring the flaw of the organic world into this potentialy perfect digital world. I think that doesn't fit and therefore I don't want to hear other peoples voices and don't want them to hear mine. I want to keep the nice delusion up in both ways.

[Laetizia Coronet]

"Instead of imagining that the avatars around me were talking, I pictured real life people at desks with headsets. [...] Last night I was witnessing not a conversation on Help Island, but rather a conference call with fancy but useless graphics."

Read more here.

[starcomber Vig]

Voice has never become predominant in software as a major way of interaction as it implies isolation. I clearly can not afford a headset. We have wives, children, a whole studio crew, phone calls and Skype most of the time for business related chat. Skype works fine with my firewall machine, which is a powerbook. This machine happen to have a mic that works flawlessly with iChat, Skype and many other thin clients for voice but not w/ SL. LL recommends a headset. I want to believe this recommendation comes from software limitations and that, in time it will get better and I could use SL as a viable platform for voice chat with my clients. For now I'll stay with Skype.

There is another little drill, I promise this to be the last time i talk about it. The interface on the Voice client SUCKS. Period. It does in an all-round way. There are no excuses to produce a pane window, an omni-comprehensive one, that is usability-wise as flawed as this one. I hope, in behalf of me and my crew, that some Linden of power will take the wise decision to sack the Communicate window altogether.

[Lillie Yifu]

I am enabled, but about 60%of the time since the client was officially "the client" I have not been able to use voice. This is worse than when it was "first look."

The most common problem is that if the client crashed the time before, voice does not work for me coming back up. So I have to log in, lot out, log in, log out, log in, until it works.

This, is less.