I just don't see what the huge improvement would be. It's really not that hard to type compared to have voice recognition for all kinds of languages, dialects a

I just don't see what the huge improvement would be. It's really not that hard to type compared to have voice recognition for all kinds of languages, dialects and accents. Not to speak of "press button, speak into phone, wait for translation, proof read text, press send, wait for confirmation, wait for response, do it all again". And while whatapp is nice, it's like five, or even ten, years ago nice by asian standards. The "west" fucked up by trying to protect telecom companies revenues so the networks become fragmented. Imagine if SMS instead was a free secure data channel with pubsub features, there would be huge incentives for interoperability. All in all I think the post kind of shows the different of mindset in the west vs. emerging markets. In emerging markets people use whatever they can however they can. If you go and visit suppliers in china they often have three phones and two desktop clients open at the same time. With built-in translation and sending files, pictures and money back and forth.