Phone Calls Are Dead. Voice Chat Is the Future.

In the swing from calls to texts, we lost the warmth and humanity that made the telephone work in the first place; there are better ways to talk

It's faster than a phone call, warmer and more human than a text message. Voice messaging is the chat platform you should be using, explains WSJ's David Pierce, and it's already on your phone. Photo/Video: Emily Prapuolenis/The Wall Street Journal
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Steve Jobs should have called it the iText. Maybe the iNstagram, or the iUberEverywhere. The iPhone—like every other phone in 2018—is many things, but it isn’t much of a phone.

For decades, the best and often only way to reach someone out of earshot was to call them on the phone. The internet brought chat, FaceTime, Instagram, Snapchat stories and a host of other ways to keep in touch that made phone calls seem wildly inefficient. For many of us, the phone call over the past few years has gone the way of the telegraph and...