iOS 17’s Live Voicemail
Live Voicemail finally means I can turn on another feature that I’ve been tempted to use since iOS 13: Silence Unknown Callers.
I’ve always been reticent to turn on Silence Unknown Callers because I worry too much about missing important calls. There are simply too many times that I get a call I don’t want to miss from, say, a doctor’s office, or a delivery person, or a contractor.
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But in iOS 17, if you have Silence Unknown Callers active, callers with unrecognized numbers will go straight to Live Voicemail, allowing you to decide whether or not to pick up.
Previously:
Update (2023-07-17): Juli Clover:
Unless you have a custom-created voicemail message, the default iOS 17 voicemail recording asks callers to provide a reason why they’re calling after the tone sounds, and are informed that “the person you’re calling may pick up.” Note that if you had a custom message in iOS 16 , there will be no change, so this impacts people who are using the default voicemail greeting feature.
The “may pick up” wording seems to be confusing some people who are calling iPhone owners that have iOS 17 installed. Two separate Reddit threads feature complaints from Reddit users who have received calls from people who have not understood Apple’s messaging.
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Presumably the inbound voice message is stored locally on the phone; as far as the cellular carrier is concerned, the call was answered. So in the cases where the line is in use or has no service, the carrier's regular voice mail would take the call as usual. How are these two distinct message stores presented in the UI? How does it work with carriers that don't support Visual Voicemail?
How does the fact that the new voicemail has live transcript help with not missing silenced calls?
It helps with screening them, but if they’re silent you’ll still miss them if people don’t leave a message. And if they do, the old voicemail also caught them.
Super disappointing this feature doesn’t seem to be getting released outside US/Canada. It’s conspicuously absent from Apple’s iOS 17 page in Australia.
