I have had a soft phone at my last two jobs, and it was never used. We used Skype or Slack for our text communication, and Google Hangouts for more personal communication. And it worked perfectly well for maintaining a good flow of communication.
Voice mail is, like texting, an asynchronous method of communication, but it requires more hardware and mental context switching to receive and respond to voice messages.
I think the biggest hurdle to adopting something like this is going to be the different perception of voice mail (and phone calls in general) between generations.
voice mail is asynchronous for the person sending it, but it's somewhat synchronous when you're on the receiving end: you cannot skip through the boring parts right to the interesting content, you have to linearly listen to the entire message. I think this is the biggest problem with voicemail. If all voicemail could turn speech into text, and it would end up in your e-mail inbox or "voice mail" app on your phone, we'd have the best of both worlds.
This is what I use Google Voice for. It translates the voice mail into text, and will send it in an email. It's not perfect, but it's good enough to figure out why the person called, and it does a good job capturing the phone number the person leaves.
damn, I'm not in the US but that sounds very cool. Is it US only? I'm sure that's why 97% of our generation dropped voice mail. It's just not as convenient as text.
the first part is to get the content (including boring parts) right every time, and alas I think speech-to-text commercial software is still not there yet for speech where the person isn't explicitly talking to be listened to by a computer (check Youtube captions for a good laugh).
Voice mail is, like texting, an asynchronous method of communication, but it requires more hardware and mental context switching to receive and respond to voice messages.
I think the biggest hurdle to adopting something like this is going to be the different perception of voice mail (and phone calls in general) between generations.