How the Evolution of the Phone Call Impacts CRE – Connected Real Estate Magazine

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Mobile device use is one of the primary reasons commercial real estate owners have been tasked with providing tenants with reliable wireless connectivity. A reliable network allows tenants to use their mobile devices to send emails, stream videos, send and receive text messages and even, gasp, make phone calls.

Yes, people do still talk on their cell phones. That fact has not changedhow they talk on them has somewhat though. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Yahoo! Labs conducted a study to see how teenagers use video chat. What they found was subjects liked to multitask while they talked with friendstheyd turn on a video chat and put their phone somewhere, according to Yahoo! principal research associate Frank Bentley.

Theyd basically use it as open audio because the camera would just be pointing at the ceiling, he told The Wall Street Journal.

Open audio is not that far off from making a phone call, but under the guise of video chat, the conversation seems less impolite to people, according to Bentley.

Its almost seen as rude to call someone, he told The Wall Street Journal. Its as if theyre saying I am going to disturb someone and make their phone ring and interrupt them and force them to pay attention to me.

The hesitation to call someone doesnt apply to just teenagers however. According to consumer-research firm MRI-Simmons talking was the most popular way to communicate with a cell phone in Fall 2012. Ninety-four percent of MRI-Simmons survey respondents said theyd use their cell phone to talk during the prior week.

Fast-forward to spring 2019, where talking was the least popular cell phone communication method. Only 45% of survey takers said they used their phone to talk with someone in the prior week. The standard call came behind texting, email, posting to social media and using chat apps in the survey. Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Bindley noted multiple people she interviewed for the article said they assume someone died when their phone rings unexpectedly.

However, there are app developers and investors who believe voice communication over the phone is not the issuemaking the phone call is the problem. Theyre betting voice communication will supplant text again given the rise of smart speakers, wireless earbuds, group messaging and the aforementioned video chat.

Calling is fundamentally broken, Alex Ma, co-founder and CEO of the company behind audio-chat app TTYL (Talk To You Later), told The Wall Street Journal. We went from landlines to the iPhone X but we havent changed the way we call people.

Mas TTYL app allows users to see when their friends are free to talkeliminating that feeling of being rude. People can have a room open for others to join or lock it for privacy. TTYL was designed for small close groupsonly people users would want to hear from.

What our app allows you to do is in a single tap, jump into someones ears and start a conversation, Ma said.

Another app, Chalk, lets users combine a text chat with the ability to switch to a voice conversation, The Wall Street Journal reports. Users can go into listen-only mode where they can hear everything, but cant respond via voice. Instead they can text a response or turn their microphone back on. The idea is to decrease how long it takes to toggle between communication methods.

People were designed to have voice conversations, Juyan Azhang, co-founder and CEO of the company behind Chalk, told The Wall Street Journal. I dont think we were designed to have phone calls, and I think people lump those things together and I guess our goal is in some ways to peel that apart.

What does a potential voice over phone evolution mean for CRE? Well, if apps like TTYL and Chalk become a more prominent communication tool, especially in the workplace, CRE owners will have to have a wireless network in place that can accommodate it. Its one thing to have enough wireless bandwidth to handle cell phone calls and standard text messages. However, it could be quite another if a majority of tenants are relying on voice messaging and video chats are their primary communication source.

For example, seed-stage venture capital firm Betaworks Ventures recently announced an 11-week Audiocamp that includes mentorship and funding for startup companies that are focused on audio, according to The Wall Street Journal. The firm invested in Yac Chat, an audio messaging platform for remote workers. Users can send and receive voice messages similar to how instant messages are transmitted, but people can listen to the message when they want. Betaworks partner Peter Rojas believes voice messaging is a better fit for the workplace.

Most people dont want to be on a conference call all day, he told The Wall Street Journal. You have to balance the things that are special and better about audio with the things that are annoying. If you have never really spent a lot of time using phone calls, your relationship to audio is going to be different.

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How the Evolution of the Phone Call Impacts CRE - Connected Real Estate Magazine