Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

restofworld.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

#61

Post by mattnewton »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #2

I understand why people use it but as a recipient I really hate voice messages. Here in Spain they are becoming more common too. The problem is as the article mentions. Difficulty searching back, not being able to use Google translate (I'm still learning Spanish), and the time it takes to listen to them. Sending a voice message is faster than typing for the sender but much slower than reading for the recipient which…

I think on-device text transcription is getting good enough where hopefully it catches on. I've been impressed by how good it works on cheap Android phones for English, no idea how it is progressing for other languages but I have to imagine it will; but there is a question of whether senders still prefer the voice snippets for some reason. Transcribing on the receiving end could work too but unfortunately has disadvantages like not having access to the sender's dictionary and corrections.

Re: Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

#62

Post by jhugo »

londons_explore wrote: post #21
GekkePrutser wrote: post #2

I understand why people use it but as a recipient I really hate voice messages. Here in Spain they are becoming more common too. The problem is as the article mentions. Difficulty searching back, not being able to use Google translate (I'm still learning Spanish), and the time it takes to listen to them. Sending a voice message is faster than typing for the sender but much slower than reading for the recipient which…

I'm really surprised that no chat apps seem to auto-transcribe voice messages. It would seem obvious for the transcription and the sound file to be available to both sender and receiver of the message. I think so far the sticking point is that message transcription is still hard to do with any accuracy on-device, and if you use a server then you can't claim e2e encryption.

WeChat has been doing it for quite a while, and does a great job. Almost certainly server-side and obviously very far from E2EE though :)

Re: Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

#63

Post by Asraelite »

dash2 wrote: post #28

It says Cambodia has 74 characters, "the most of any language in the world". That sounds wrong. Hindi's Devanagari has 100+ characters, though some are certainly related to each other.

It's definitely wrong. The misconception might come from the fact that Khmer Script used to hold the official title of "alphabet with the most letters". It has since been reclassified as an abugida, not an alphabet, but many sources still proclaim it as the world's biggest alphabet.

Re: Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

#64

Post by smoe »

mattnewton wrote: post #61
GekkePrutser wrote: post #2

I understand why people use it but as a recipient I really hate voice messages. Here in Spain they are becoming more common too. The problem is as the article mentions. Difficulty searching back, not being able to use Google translate (I'm still learning Spanish), and the time it takes to listen to them. Sending a voice message is faster than typing for the sender but much slower than reading for the recipient which…

I think on-device text transcription is getting good enough where hopefully it catches on. I've been impressed by how good it works on cheap Android phones for English, no idea how it is progressing for other languages but I have to imagine it will; but there is a question of whether senders still prefer the voice snippets for some reason. Transcribing on the receiving end could work too but unfortunately has disadva…

Spanish seems to work quite well also. Know a couple of people that dictate their messages regularly. Even had a situation when for the live of me I couldn't understand a local because of his very strong dialect (I'm a fluent speaker, but not native). After some intents he got frustrated, picked up his cheap android phone to talk into and the transcription worked perfectly.

Re: Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

#65

Post by Freeboots »

For anyone unfamiliar, Khmer is phonetically written, with (from an English speaking perspective) complicated rules for character placement thats arent always 'linear', eg some characters go above or below the previous or next character. The phonetic order is confusing. As mentioned in the article, there are a lot of characters, and no spaces between words. There are also at least two competing systems/programs for typing these characters on a standard keyboard.

There is no real standard romanisation similar to Pinyin for Chinese. The UN tried creating one in the 90s, and there are a couple of homegrown alternatives, but as mentioned in the article, most people just kind of make up the spelling and hope the recipient can figure it out. Until quite recently lot of people still had 'dumb' phones sending character limited sms, so spelling has been 'creative' (I stopped carrying a dumb phone as a daily driver probably around 2017-18, so really quite recent).

Basically as the article says, its a huge pain in the ass to type in Khmer, especially on a phone. If that crack team of overpaid consultants had jumped on the phone to anyone in Cambodia, they could have explained why voice messaging is so prevalent.

Re: Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

#66

Post by lotsofpulp »

dahart wrote: post #58
arlburn wrote: post #41

I do think that voice messaging is a waste of time compared to reading. You can read fast enough to churn out information, but you need to wait for every second to digest the information in a voice call.

You’re not accounting for the time it takes to compose text, and use thumbs to type text. I can’t stand trying to plan outings with people via text because it’s so damn slow and the message size is so small. We always end up calling each other to talk it out because it’s many times faster.

I remember group projects in college where we would sit together, but because we were all using laptops and had full keyboards, it was quicker for us to type our thoughts in a group chat on the laptop than to verbally converse with each other even though we were all sitting within a few feet of each other.

Re: Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

#67

Post by 999900000999 »

arlburn wrote: post #41

I do think that voice messaging is a waste of time compared to reading. You can read fast enough to churn out information, but you need to wait for every second to digest the information in a voice call.

It's much easier to convey emotions via voice.

Also, as a language learner I can write 我是美国人。 But can I speak it properly ? Being able to send voice messages is a great option

Re: Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

#68

Post by dahart »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #66
dahart wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not accounting for the time it takes to compose text, and use thumbs to type text. I can’t stand trying to plan outings with people via text because it’s so damn slow and the message size is so small. We always end up calling each other to talk it out because it’s many times faster.

I remember group projects in college where we would sit together, but because we were all using laptops and had full keyboards, it was quicker for us to type our thoughts in a group chat on the laptop than to verbally converse with each other even though we were all sitting within a few feet of each other.

Typing with a keyboard is a good point - it’s fast. I can average almost twice my Boggle score if I type instead of writing.

I agree you can read faster than listen, but I just don’t buy that typing is faster than talking though, not for conversation. When you talk, the speaking and the listening are overlapping. Sentences are generally understood before the speaker even finishes saying them. That’s doesn’t happen with text chat. When you type into chat, the communication is serialized. There are reasons a group sitting together might use devices instead of talking, but I find it hard to believe that efficiency of speech is really a primary reason, unless you’re talking about sharing media like sources, images & movies, quotes, references, code, etc. for a group project.

Re: Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

#69

Post by Freeboots »

miyuru wrote: post #10

I am Sri Lankan and we have our own language, but most of the the people type the phonetic Sinhala word in English characters and it works really well. Wonder why that did not happened in Cambodia.

People do, but it isnt really standardised. Article mentions how all the crazy spellings lead to difficulties with things like ML.

Also older people dont always know english characters very well. Some do, or the might know some french so they can figure it out, but not everyone

Re: Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia

#70

Post by pmontra »

metafunctor wrote: post #12
GekkePrutser wrote: post #2

I understand why people use it but as a recipient I really hate voice messages. Here in Spain they are becoming more common too. The problem is as the article mentions. Difficulty searching back, not being able to use Google translate (I'm still learning Spanish), and the time it takes to listen to them. Sending a voice message is faster than typing for the sender but much slower than reading for the recipient which…

I feel the same about consuming any kind of information. Most of the time, a well written article trumps a podcast or video 6:1. It's the same for a text message vs. voice message.

For computer stuff usually text is better than video, except maybe how to do complex stuff in some desktop application or walk through games. But for learning how to raise a fence a video is so much better than text.
Post reply on HN