When do you listen to your office voicemails: as soon as they arrive, when you get a moment, once a day or never?

Consumers, particularly business users, are saying that voicemail is clumsy, time-consuming and useless when it comes to getting information across quickly and efficiently.

“Voicemail is a little too laissez-faire these days,” Shaun Collins, an analyst at CCS Insight said. “E-mail or text is much more effective.”

Mike Arrington, the TechCrunch uber-blogger, spoke for many when he wrote recently: “Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.”

In the tech community and beyond, he added, a common answer-phone message is: “Don’t leave a message. E-mail or text me.”

In today’s busy, busy world of instant communications, voicemail seems quaint. There is no way of knowing if or when a message will be received, and the industry estimates that 20 per cent of the billions of voicemails left each year simply sit there, unloved and unheard.

Part of the reason is the perception of inequality that comes with voicemail. It is easier to leave a message than to listen to it, and for the busy executive that can cause resentment.

Frustration with voicemail has created a market for technologies that seek to update it. The iPhone, for example, has a visual voicemail service that lets you choose which messages to open or delete without having to wade through voice menus or listen to them all in order.

More radically, the British company Spinvox will translate voicemail into text messages or e-mails and send them to a phone or computer. That lets the listener digest the contents more quickly, eliminates the hassle of writing down names and phone numbers, and enables messages to be archived and indexed by search engines.

SpinVox claims that translating voicemail into text or e-mail lifts the response rate to 87 per cent, compared with 40 per cent for traditional voicemail.

Daniel Doulton, who co-founded the company in 2004 with Christina Domecq, says: “We found that voicemail was a pain to use. It takes about seven steps to listen to a message and the onus was on you to do it. We wanted a one-step solution.”

An intriguing extension of the service recently launched in Spain allows a caller to “speak” a text message to the person they are trying to reach. The free service available to all Vodafone Spain customers could put an end to clumsily thumbed texts.

But amid all the excitement of the early adopters, it is worth remembering that large parts of the population are content with voicemail. For some, the nuance and emotion of a voicemail simply does not translate into a text message or an e-mail.

Mr Doulton disagrees, arguing that because you know who sent you the voicemail-as-text, you can appreciate the emotional content of the whispered “I love you”.

We can all at least be grateful that there are no dreaded emoticons :( included in the service.

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