A client of ours recently received an email with an audio message from a work colleague. She asked me if this technology would make sense for her.

Here’s what I think:

For an important contact it might make sense, but generally I don’t think it’s practical in our hyper-efficient-communicating work life. Although I am a huge fan of listening to podcasts while driving and creating video to make a point, I don’t like this medium inserted in my efficient-daily-email-communiques for the following reasons:

• The audio/video takes too long to record and upload (based on my experience)
• It takes longer for the receiver to view/listen to the message since they cannot scan text. Look at Google Voice, they actually translate voicemail to text and even send it to your phone as SMS for quick reading.
• This format does not work well on a mobile device. I would also rather use a text to voice application to listen to my emails in the car.
• And… it doesn’t scale well. If it’s great and everyone used it all the time, would we get sick of spending time listening to or watching our emails? I think so.

I would rather produce video content for my website, broadcast it on YouTube/Facebook, and then use the humble link to the videos in my email.

This is what I do today and it works great on all platforms. Ask me again in 10 years!