It's not a solution for you, but you're one of a shrinking group. Phone calls as a way to communicate with unknown people are on the way out, no one under 40 uses that method except under extreme duress.
I've been on-call for decades and 24x7 caregiver and it's not an issue, even in emergencies:
1. For non-emergencies, just use social media or email, which have better anti-spam filtration.
2. For most true emergencies, "hang up and call 911" just like every doctor's office recording says.
3. For urgent non-emergencies, either accept the consequences of waiting until your can reach the person via option #1 above, or get creative. Contact friends of the person and ask if they can get ahold of them... or someone IRL near them to get their real-world attention.
4. Consider what happens if you lose or break your phone. Responsible people let a reasonable group of people know how to reach them, and the rest contact a member of that group.
25 year odl here, I prefer phone calls as my primary method of communication, and often place calls as my first method of contact with previously-uncontacted entities. Please check your assumptions :)
IDK, my iPhone will show me the live transcription of the callers message without me answering it. And then if I want to speak to them, I can answer the call in the middle of the message being left and talk to them.
Sounds cool, but this concept isn't at all new. Anyone who used answering machines did exactly this. You would listen to the message being left in real-time and pick up if you actually wanted to talk to them.
If people can't be bothered to leave a message, then that's their problem.
Callers can't (well, shouldn't) expect to be able to reach you immediately by calling you. There's a lot of valid reasons to not answer your phone. You might be driving, you might be in the bathroom, you might be getting lunch in a noisy place, you might be in the middle of a different important conversation, etc.
At which point the caller needs to realize that the "professional" thing to do is leave a message if they want to be called back. (Or try calling again later.) Because there's enough junk calls that expecting people to call back every missed call that didn't leave a message is just unreasonable.
My phone shows a live transcription of the message being left.
If I see that it's an important call, then I can pick up and answer right there mid-voicemail.
That's what I was referring to. They start talking when they leave the voicemail.
This is how we did it for a long time with home answering machines too. Except instead of reading a live transcription, you listened to their live recording, and could interrupt it and answer if you wanted to talk to them. It's not a new idea.
