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

147 points by killing_time 5y ago

dash2 5y ago
It says Cambodia has 74 characters, "the most of any language in the world". That sounds wrong. Hindi's Devanagari has 100+ characters, though some are certainly related to each other.
- throwawayay02 5y ago
  I also found that weird. Wouldn't the various Chinese languages, and Japanese scripts, have way more characters? 26 to 74 is just double, and most likely some are more common in written communication than others.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    >26 to 74 is just double It's closer to triple, isn't it?
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    > Wouldn't the various Chinese languages, and Japanese scripts, have way more characters? It depends on how you define "character", I guess. The hirigana or katakana "alphabets" have 48 characters. These alphabets map best to the western use of characters. Kanji is probably what you are thinking of, where each word in Japanese gets its own "character". There are ~50,000 different kanji symbols.
- Asraelite 5y ago
  It's definitely wrong. The misconception might come from the fact that Khmer Script used to hold the official title of "alphabet with the most letters". It has since been reclassified as an abugida, not an alphabet, but many sources still proclaim it as the world's biggest alphabet.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I understand why people use it but as a recipient I really hate voice messages. Here in Spain they are becoming more common too. The problem is as the article mentions. Difficulty searching back, not being able to use Google translate (I'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't think it's very social. And then there's the issue of listening to them in public, having to dig around for headphones if you don't want to bother your surroundings. So in general if someone audio messages me I just ignore it until they type their message. 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. 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 :)
- capableweb 5y ago
  > 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 :) I'd be very interested in something like this! Also deal with 3 different languages on a daily basis in different group chats, and many people use voice messages. If you get started I'd for sure contribute to your effort, as having to change from "reading" to "listening" so often really sucks and would save me a lot of time if I could have it transcribed.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Thanks, I had it on my list to investigate, will let you know! Part of the problem is that I'd like to use a service that isn't too privacy invasive. Unfortunately I doubt there is one that's good and doesn't do that :)
- kartoshechka 5y ago
  > don't want to bother your surroundings all apps with voice messages I happened to use support playback through voice speaker, if you put the phone to the ear as if you were just speaking with someone but I don't really remember how I discovered that and it seems that majority of users don't even know about this feature
miyuru 5y ago
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. Wonder why that did not happened in Cambodia.
- yorwba 5y ago
  It did happen, as you can see in the second screenshot in the article.
  - miyuru 5y ago
    It seems like I missed the last part of the article. Thanks for pointing it out.
- Freeboots 5y ago
  People do, but it isnt really standardised. Article mentions how all the crazy spellings lead to difficulties with things like ML. Also older people dont always know english characters very well. Some do, or the might know some french so they can figure it out, but not everyone
kleinsch 5y ago
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.
rvba 5y ago
Interesting that Facebook doesnt have a translitetation service to spy on them? 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?
rvba 5y ago
Interesting that Facebook doesnt have a translitetation service to spy on them? 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?
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  >How do they translate the site or sell ads there? Historically, FB used to let users translate the site (presumably they don't do this any more). And yeah, Cambodia is not a large ad market (not enough rich people) so it's unlikely that they have a sales team based there.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    Musing out loud: I wonder if FB knows who the Cambodian elite are, and have targetted marketing for them, probably in English. Geez, if I had a social network and no morals and no fears of getting caught (or the fines are cheaper than the possible profits), I'd quietly try to sell "eyeball access" to high net-worth invidivuals, who I can easily find in the database. Although who'd want this access, aren't Facebook ads just mostly scams nowadays? (I just realize I get a lot of ads on Instagram, and most of them look legit enough)
pablok2 5y ago
Didn't know Cambodia is half of the metaverse
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 5y ago
Cambodia also had internet.org But no one used it, it was a wasteland, because internet.org doesn't do pictures or video on Facebook. And certainly no one gives a shit about free Wikipedia that's tacked on. A good example of the poor don't want your garbage. They want funny videos, shopping (Commonly live streamed on Facebook) and talking to their friends. That's what improved their lives.
arlburn 5y ago
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.
- mabbo 5y ago
  > you need to wait for every second to digest the information in a voice call. That's highly person-dependent. Some kind of auditory processing disorder runs in my family, and I definitely have it. Under a lot of conditions, I need to spend extra time to digest and understand what has been said. But not everyone is like this. For a lot of people, hearing is digesting, is understanding. And like many things, people presume that their own experience is the universal experience- you presume everyone needs to digest, and the person sending you the audio message presumes everyone can process it instantly.
- bierjunge 5y ago
  "Ehm, I wanted to tell you, you know, eventually (...)" <- this are three to five seconds I'm not getting any information, but if it would be text, my brain would skip this unimportant part instantly. This is why I never listen to voice messages. If it's important to be expressed with your voice, then call. >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. This can happen, but I can reread the message or just parts of it fairly easy. With voice messages it's getting annoying when you need to rewind to a specific part of it, especially if the message is 2-3 minutes long. And there is also the audio quality and background noise, but it's a different topic.
- dahart 5y ago
  You’re not accounting for the time it takes to compose text, and use thumbs to type text. I can’t stand trying to plan outings with people via text because it’s so damn slow and the message size is so small. We always end up calling each other to talk it out because it’s many times faster.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
m-p-3 5y ago
It would be nice if there was a speech-to-text included automatically with voice messages. Even if it's imperfect, you could still listen to the original voice message if there's a hiccup, but it would make it at least searchable and readable in places where playing audio would be frowned upon.
TruthWillHurt 5y ago
"..a Facebook study attempted to ask users in countries with high audio use, but was only able to find a single Cambodian respondent." Sell your stocks. that's a dead, bloated company. A plane ticket and asking people on the street would probably cost less than their "study"..
dahart 5y ago
> 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. I’m immediately skeptical of this for two reasons: - 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. - 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 feels unlikely to me, especially in combination with the above. (Population of Cambodia: ~16.7 million. Population of earth: ~7.75 billion.)
Freeboots 5y ago
For anyone unfamiliar, Khmer is phonetically written, with (from an English speaking perspective) complicated rules for character placement thats arent always 'linear', 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/programs for typing these characters on a standard keyboard. 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 'dumb' phones sending character limited sms, so spelling has been 'creative' (I stopped carrying a dumb phone as a daily driver probably around 2017-18, so really quite recent). 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.
bigodbiel 5y ago
Voice message seems to combine the worst of both text and voice communication.

147 points by killing_time 5y ago

It says Cambodia has 74 characters, "the most of any language in the world". That sounds wrong. Hindi's Devanagari has 100+ characters, though some are certainly related to each other.

throwawayay02 5y ago
I also found that weird. Wouldn't the various Chinese languages, and Japanese scripts, have way more characters? 26 to 74 is just double, and most likely some are more common in written communication than others.
- tyingq 5y ago
  >26 to 74 is just double It's closer to triple, isn't it?
- dahfizz 5y ago
  > Wouldn't the various Chinese languages, and Japanese scripts, have way more characters? It depends on how you define "character", I guess. The hirigana or katakana "alphabets" have 48 characters. These alphabets map best to the western use of characters. Kanji is probably what you are thinking of, where each word in Japanese gets its own "character". There are ~50,000 different kanji symbols.
Asraelite 5y ago
It's definitely wrong. The misconception might come from the fact that Khmer Script used to hold the official title of "alphabet with the most letters". It has since been reclassified as an abugida, not an alphabet, but many sources still proclaim it as the world's biggest alphabet.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

I understand why people use it but as a recipient I really hate voice messages. Here in Spain they are becoming more common too. The problem is as the article mentions. Difficulty searching back, not being able to use Google translate (I'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't think it's very social. And then there's the issue of listening to them in public, having to dig around for headphones if you don't want to bother your surroundings. So in general if someone audio messages me I just ignore it until they type their message. 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. 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 :)

capableweb 5y ago
> 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 :) I'd be very interested in something like this! Also deal with 3 different languages on a daily basis in different group chats, and many people use voice messages. If you get started I'd for sure contribute to your effort, as having to change from "reading" to "listening" so often really sucks and would save me a lot of time if I could have it transcribed.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Thanks, I had it on my list to investigate, will let you know! Part of the problem is that I'd like to use a service that isn't too privacy invasive. Unfortunately I doubt there is one that's good and doesn't do that :)
kartoshechka 5y ago
> don't want to bother your surroundings all apps with voice messages I happened to use support playback through voice speaker, if you put the phone to the ear as if you were just speaking with someone but I don't really remember how I discovered that and it seems that majority of users don't even know about this feature

miyuru 5y ago

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. Wonder why that did not happened in Cambodia.

yorwba 5y ago
It did happen, as you can see in the second screenshot in the article.
- miyuru 5y ago
  It seems like I missed the last part of the article. Thanks for pointing it out.
Freeboots 5y ago
People do, but it isnt really standardised. Article mentions how all the crazy spellings lead to difficulties with things like ML. Also older people dont always know english characters very well. Some do, or the might know some french so they can figure it out, but not everyone

kleinsch 5y ago

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.

rvba 5y ago

Interesting that Facebook doesnt have a translitetation service to spy on them? 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?

rvba 5y ago

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
>How do they translate the site or sell ads there? Historically, FB used to let users translate the site (presumably they don't do this any more). And yeah, Cambodia is not a large ad market (not enough rich people) so it's unlikely that they have a sales team based there.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Musing out loud: I wonder if FB knows who the Cambodian elite are, and have targetted marketing for them, probably in English. Geez, if I had a social network and no morals and no fears of getting caught (or the fines are cheaper than the possible profits), I'd quietly try to sell "eyeball access" to high net-worth invidivuals, who I can easily find in the database. Although who'd want this access, aren't Facebook ads just mostly scams nowadays? (I just realize I get a lot of ads on Instagram, and most of them look legit enough)

pablok2 5y ago

Didn't know Cambodia is half of the metaverse

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aaron695 5y ago

Cambodia also had internet.org But no one used it, it was a wasteland, because internet.org doesn't do pictures or video on Facebook. And certainly no one gives a shit about free Wikipedia that's tacked on. A good example of the poor don't want your garbage. They want funny videos, shopping (Commonly live streamed on Facebook) and talking to their friends. That's what improved their lives.

arlburn 5y ago

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.

mabbo 5y ago
> you need to wait for every second to digest the information in a voice call. That's highly person-dependent. Some kind of auditory processing disorder runs in my family, and I definitely have it. Under a lot of conditions, I need to spend extra time to digest and understand what has been said. But not everyone is like this. For a lot of people, hearing is digesting, is understanding. And like many things, people presume that their own experience is the universal experience- you presume everyone needs to digest, and the person sending you the audio message presumes everyone can process it instantly.
bierjunge 5y ago
"Ehm, I wanted to tell you, you know, eventually (...)" <- this are three to five seconds I'm not getting any information, but if it would be text, my brain would skip this unimportant part instantly. This is why I never listen to voice messages. If it's important to be expressed with your voice, then call. >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. This can happen, but I can reread the message or just parts of it fairly easy. With voice messages it's getting annoying when you need to rewind to a specific part of it, especially if the message is 2-3 minutes long. And there is also the audio quality and background noise, but it's a different topic.
dahart 5y ago
You’re not accounting for the time it takes to compose text, and use thumbs to type text. I can’t stand trying to plan outings with people via text because it’s so damn slow and the message size is so small. We always end up calling each other to talk it out because it’s many times faster.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago

m-p-3 5y ago

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

TruthWillHurt 5y ago

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

dahart 5y ago

> 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. I’m immediately skeptical of this for two reasons: - 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. - 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 feels unlikely to me, especially in combination with the above. (Population of Cambodia: ~16.7 million. Population of earth: ~7.75 billion.)

Freeboots 5y ago

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

bigodbiel 5y ago

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