In the 1980s, voicemail was cool, but now it’s just a technological relic.

Voicemail has been replaced by more convenient phone functions. The person you’re trying to reach didn’t pick up? Send them a short text message. It’s much more effective and welcome than the ordeal of listening to a tinny voice leaving a rambling voicemail on an answering machine.

But, until phone makers stop putting the voicemail option in their phones, there are a couple of options to skirt around using voicemail.

1. Convert voicemail to text
iOS 10 and any iPhone later than the 6s lets you turn your voice mails into a transcript. As with all talk-to-text functions, it isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done. There are other apps that do basically the same thing for Android phones or earlier versions of the iPhone.

2. Turn off voicemail
This is an easier option, just because it prevents people from even getting the chance to leave you a voicemail. No More Voicemail, a free app available on both iOS and Android makes this easy. Whenever someone tries to leave a voicemail, the app redirects them to a number that keeps ringing and ring ad infinitum. It’s like the old days, before Voicemail even existed.

For those who still want to cling to the voice message, most text apps have that figured out. For example, iOS 10 lets users send voice messages within it’s text messaging function. Once the user listens to the message, he can choose to save it iOS will delete it automatically after two minutes.

This may be the best solution: integrating voice messaging into other apps, effectively killing the unnecessary independent voicemail option.