its one of the oldest cinematic devices known. So-I'm wondering-are you really that daft or-trollin'???

having late deafness.. ( at age
my brain puts in the voices of the movie stars i know..
however.. it also adds voices to people i have never heard, like my pals and girl friend ( my brain tells me she sounds like meg ryan with a slight english accent).
AANND it adds a few voices from people i text or chat with a lot..
it adds a crazy creepy voice to a few trolls here on IMDB..think hanibal lector with a touch of vincent price

Actually I do that, when I'm talking to someone on Instant Message I usually speak what I'm typing, just a habit I've always had. lol
Create a society in which you would like to live, not knowing what you're going to come into it as.

Exactly.
This entire method of "communicating", which was them speaking the words they were typing, were exclusively for the purposes of the audience.
No one wanted to sit in a movie and read out a bunch of typed text. It goes nowhere in the grand scheme of things.
LISTEN! Do you smell something?

No, she could not really hear his voice. The "What?!" came because she could hear the beeping of the cursor at the end of his sentence when he typed (which we couldn't hear).

I thought that too, b/c there was a time I THINK when Terri was
turned away from the screen and Jack said something and she was like, "What?!"
Well I know e-mail existed back then but only for like big corporations probably like banks, but it wasn't called e-mail then though.
Just because we lose today's battle doesn't mean we've lost tommorow's war.

Was this type of communication even possible back in 1986? Or was a bit of futurisitc fantasy threw in about what MIGHT *and obviously did * come.
I wondered that myself. I can only imagine that it may have not been Jack's voice, but a computer program that simulated an English accent.
"I'd say this cloud is Cumulo Nimbus."
"Didn't he discover America?"
"Penfold, shush."

Was this type of communication even possible back in 1986? Or was a bit of futurisitc fantasy threw in about what MIGHT *and obviously did * come.
Question your prejudices.

The voice isn't always there. Just after she hears his voice on the machine.

Probably given the time of the movie being made. Today (real world), I believe you can have voice (albeit may be time delayed) recognition as words are being typed.

No. She's not really hearing his voice. It's as you said, she's recreating his voice in her own head after hearing it on the answer machine.
Mecca