A woman speaks into her phone.
Voice texts are not new—on iPhones, they launched in 2014—but they have gained obvious new appeal during the past year of isolation.Photograph from Shutterstock

Ayear ago, when life in New York City suddenly contracted to the size of my living room, I got very into making phone calls. Like many others, I took comfort in long, meandering gab sessions; often, I’d speak to a friend late at night, while we both took refuge in our respective bathtubs. These calls were a serviceable imitation, at least for a while, of meeting someone in a dark bar and gossiping about things that don’t matter while your drinks sweat onto the table. But a simulacrum is only satisfying for so long. As the months of uncanny living stretched on, I found that I had less and less juice left at the end of the day to pour into idle conversation. Zoom “happy hours” or book clubs that were supposed to feel “restorative” began to feel like heavy obligations. I still called a few close friends to pass the time during my afternoon strolls (a practice that the Internet collectively has dubbed “stupid little walks,” for its compulsory, unfulfilling feel), but our hearts weren’t totally in it. You know the iconic nineteen-sixties snapshot of the “Valley of the Dolls” author Jacqueline Susann, gleefully squawking on the phone while wearing a floaty white nightie and sequinned slippers? After a while, the only part of that photo that seemed relatable was the nightgown.

In January, though, the teen-age daughter of a good friend helped shake me out of my communication doldrums. I had mailed P. a box of old clothing that I’d purged from my closet—one millennial’s “cheap velour party dress from 2005” can be a Gen Z-er’s “vintage collectible.” A few days later, a long blue bar of wavy radio lines appeared on my phone. Next to it was an arrow and the words “raise to listen.” I pressed play. “OMIGODRACH!!!!” I heard P. scream. She then proceeded to explain her vision for turning a Victoria’s Secret pajama set I’d sent her into several daytime looks. The message was giddy, silly—P. attends drama school and is a natural ham—and it made me laugh out loud. And then, as quickly as it appeared on my phone, it was gone—on an iPhone, if you don’t save a voice text within two minutes, the message evaporates into thin air.

This ephemeral quality makes voice texts dramatically different from voice mails, which squat on your phone indefinitely, even after you listen to them, taking up both psychic and physical space. (The only people who still leave me voice mails anyway are telemarketers, my dentist’s office, and my parents, whose messages usually involve some version of “Call me back! Oh, wait, you are calling me right now, bye!”) They’re also different from the new wave of voice-based social-media platforms that cater to a public starved for group conversation, such as High Fidelity, a party-simulation app, or Clubhouse, whose conversation rooms have got popular enough to generate a new wave of influencers. (Twitter is also leaping into this arena, with a new gathering-space feature called Spaces.) Those services are semi-public and synchronous, the kaffeeklatsches of digital life. Voice texts (also called audio messages), by contrast, are text messages with a pulse, phone calls with none of the pressure; they are fizzy zaps of connection that demand little of the recipient except that she listen and enjoy before they’re gone. They are not a new feature—on iPhones, they launched as part of the iOS8 update, way back in 2014 (and users of WhatsApp have long communicated with a similar service). But voice texting has gained obvious new appeal during the past year of isolation. At the site nofilter, the reporter Kate Lindsay wrote that she had been prepared to dismiss voice texting as “a Gen Z (or, rather, z-lennial) fad. Then the pandemic hit, and before I knew it all my text message conversations were replaced with disappearing audio snippets.”

After P.’s message, I quickly got hooked. I sent voice texts to a few old friends—some were game and volleyed right back; others reacted with a befuddled version of “What . . . is . . . this?”. But I found my most devoted correspondents among friends from Twitter, after I put out a call out asking who was interested in trying voice texting out. One of the first people to take me up on it was Dorothy Berry, an archivist at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Well, first she sent me a picture of an old, eighteen-nineties Morris chair. She then proceeded to sing me an Irving Berlin vaudeville song called “You’d Be Surprised,” about a guy named Johnny who is not much to look at, “but in a Morris chair, you’d be surprised.” The writer Christina Grace and I got in a habit of sending each other snippets of movie scores and analyses of our favorite erotic thrillers. Rachel Adelicia, a blogger and actor from Los Angeles who has been living with family in Texas during the pandemic, would leave me loopy, luxurious voice notes late at night that I’d listen to and respond to over my morning coffee (to send a voice note, at least on an iPhone, you open up Messages and then press and hold the gray circular icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen). At first, it felt awkward to speak to myself into the phone—anyone who has ever left a cringey voice mail understands the risks of spontaneous soliloquy. But, unlike with voice mails, the voice text doesn’t come with established conventions or rules or business-like airs; the only goal, I realized, was to amuse myself at the same time as I tried to amuse someone else. That and to keep things brief—there are no time limits on V.T.s, but your listener lacks the ability to rewind or fast-forward.

Adelicia told me that before this year she used the voice-text function only with a boyfriend; now she uses it all the time, with anyone who is willing. “I have a little bit of social anxiety,” she told me (via voice text, which is how I conducted all the interviews for this piece). “The thought of calling someone at this point feels like such a big deal. I really love the fact that this lets me have a very personal connection with someone, but I am not making you take time out of your day.” P., my teen-aged friend, told me that voice texting is actually still rare among her Gen Z peers, who are still by and large devoted to S.M.S. or direct messaging. Last fall, when the school year started, she started sending voice texts on a group thread with her freshman drama class. “Everyone was making fun of me, like, that’s so weird, that’s incredibly lazy,” she told me in a voice note.” But she stuck with it, and others started responding in kind. “When someone just, like, texts you the word “O.K.,” it is so dry,” she said. With voice text, “people could tell I had a personality.” Later, she told me, she changed her bio on Instagram to “if i don’t send u a voice memo, just know i’m being held captive.”

I have been writing letters throughout the pandemic (this began as a casual practice and grew into a much bigger project), but even some of my pen pals have now taken to voice texting. Amy Willen, a midwife from Chicago, voice-texts me folk songs that she noodles out on her guitar. (“The chorus is totally out of my range,” she said before a recent recording, “but I am going to sing it anyway.”) Karen Viars, a librarian from Atlanta, talks me through wild Zillow listings. She voice-texts regularly with her sister, too, but she has found that the medium is not for everyone. “I asked some other folks that I text with if they would be interested, and the answer seems to be an emphatic no,” she said. “One person actually texted me back, ‘do not like.’ ” What I’d say to those people is, give voice texts a chance. I let most of the ones I receive disappear, as a sign of good faith that this is a place to disregard inhibition. But I’ve also saved a few of my favorites to listen to again, like one in which my friend Hope Rehak does a spot-on impression of the actor Ann Dowd, or a recording in which a friend reads a passage of Terry Tempest Williams’s “When Women Were Birds.” At best, voice texts feel like tiny, ephemeral cabarets, aimed at an eager audience who has already bought into the act. They remind me that people are so much funnier and stranger and more dynamic than most virtual communication allows them to be.