In 2018, Cambodian users accounted for almost 50% of Messenger's voice function worldwide traffic.

Despite an investigation, the Facebook company has never managed to justify this figure.

That's according to a Rest of World article, based on Facebook documents that whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked.

The whistleblower revealed her identity in early October.

She was the one who provided most of the evidence for the Wall Street Journal's series of inquiries into Facebook.

A small-scale survey

In 2020, a Facebook study attempted to interview users in countries with high voicemail usage.

According to internal documents consulted by Rest of World, only one Cambodian respondent could be found.

This study revealed that, despite their first place in the ranking, Cambodians were not the only ones who preferred vocals to written messages.

The study included 30 users from the Dominican Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal and one Cambodian.

87% of respondents said they use voice tools to send notes in a language different from that defined by their applications.

The most used platform is WhatsApp, followed by Messenger and Telegram.

Khmer, the forgotten keyboards

Facebook initially assumed that this figure would relate to the country's literacy rates.

Yet, according to World Bank data, in Cambodia, the literacy rate is around 80%.

Faced with this contradictory figure, a new explanation has been formulated.

Indeed, smartphones favor Roman characters.

In other words, smartphone keyboards were not designed for Khmer.

In fact, for Cambodians, sending a voice note is faster than typing a message.

A diversity of alphabets

Spell checking, voice input, translation… Many Western users take these smartphone functions for granted.

However, they are not for all languages ​​on the planet.

More particularly, the Roman alphabet of numeric keyboards is not adapted to the Khmer writing.

Unicode is a computer standard that allows the exchange of texts in different languages, on a global level.

Although Khmer Unicode has been around since 2006, it is not sufficiently developed to allow comfortable and easy text entry.

Each key offers two different letters.

Khmer has 74 characters.

This is the largest number of characters in the world.

By comparison, French and English have 26 letters and Spanish 29.

More smartphones, fewer written messages

Facebook has been popular in Cambodia since 2009 and remains the most used platform in the country today.

76% of Cambodians have a phone capable of reading Khmer script. This is shown by USAID's “Mobile Phones and Internet Use in Cambodia 2016” report. This represents an increase of 21% over the previous year. According to the results, the feature that displays Khmer is more common on smartphones (90%) than on regular phones (66%). The ability of smartphone users to display Khmer improves with the level of education.

In short, Cambodian smartphone users find the action of typing messages tedious and many don't know how to use Khmer script on their device.

Thus, they prefer phone calls and voice messages.

The report concludes, "To increase the adoption rate of Khmer in phones, however, it will be necessary to improve text prediction functions and typing methods."

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