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

I understand why people use it but as a recipient I really hate voice messages. Here in Spain they are becoming more common too.<p>The problem is as the article mentions. Difficulty searching back, not being able to use Google translate (I&#x27;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 makes it especially annoying in group chats where you end up forcing this extra time on all participants. For this reason I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s very social.<p>And then there&#x27;s the issue of listening to them in public, having to dig around for headphones if you don&#x27;t want to bother your surroundings.<p>So in general if someone audio messages me I just ignore it until they type their message.<p>In most languages swipe typing is not a lot slower than talking anyway. And if people really want to talk they can use speech recognition.<p>I run all my chats through my own matrix server (with bridges) and I was actually thinking of making something that automatically tries to transcribe them. The problem though is that I speak 3 languages :)

For anyone unfamiliar, Khmer is phonetically written, with (from an English speaking perspective) complicated rules for character placement thats arent always &#x27;linear&#x27;, 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&#x2F;programs for typing these characters on a standard keyboard.<p>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 &#x27;dumb&#x27; phones sending character limited sms, so spelling has been &#x27;creative&#x27; (I stopped carrying a dumb phone as a daily driver probably around 2017-18, so really quite recent).<p>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.

&gt; The answer, surprisingly, has less to do with Facebook, and more to do with the complexity of the Khmer language, and the way users adapt for a technology that was never designed with them in mind.<p>I’m immediately skeptical of this for two reasons:<p>- My kids’ school announcement voice messages in the last year started combing from phone numbers in Cambodia. I live in the US. I just assume there is some extra cheap voice service there, and a strong advertising campaign.<p>- Pure speculation, but even if Cambodia’s voice message use is 100x higher than the rest of the planet, it would still be hard for Cambodians to reach 50% of the traffic for this global app. I could be dead wrong, but this <i>feels</i> unlikely to me, especially in combination with the above. (Population of Cambodia: ~16.7 million. Population of earth: ~7.75 billion.)

Headline is misleading. In 2018, 50% of voice messages in chats came from Cambodia. That’s way different than “voice traffic” which most people would assume includes calling.

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 says Cambodia has 74 characters, &quot;the most of any language in the world&quot;. That sounds wrong. Hindi&#x27;s Devanagari has 100+ characters, though some are certainly related to each other.

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.<p>Wonder why that did not happened in Cambodia.

It would be nice if there was a speech-to-text included automatically with voice messages. Even if it&#x27;s imperfect, you could still listen to the original voice message if there&#x27;s a hiccup, but it would make it at least searchable and readable in places where playing audio would be frowned upon.

Interesting that Facebook doesnt have a translitetation service to spy on them?<p>Also it sounds so strange that facebook does not have any Khmer speakers who could help them understand what is going on in the country. How do they translate the site or sell ads there? Or they simply dont, since the market is too small?

&quot;..a Facebook study attempted to ask users in countries with high audio use, but was only able to find a single Cambodian respondent.&quot;<p>Sell your stocks. that&#x27;s a dead, bloated company.<p>A plane ticket and asking people on the street would probably cost less than their &quot;study&quot;..

Didn&#x27;t know Cambodia is half of the metaverse

Interesting that Facebook doesnt have a translitetation service to spy on them?<p>Also it sounds so strange that facebook does not have any Khmer speakers who could help them understand what is going on in the country. How do they translate the site or sell ads there? Or they simply dont, since the market is too small?

Voice message seems to combine the worst of both text and voice communication.