Voicemail is pretty terrible, and this is a universally-accepted opinion. Except for your mom. You mom loves leaving voicemails.
But even mom probably hates listening to voicemails. In fact, phone owners hate most sorts of talking and listening. The word is powered by texts, and that’s probably not changing for at least the foreseeable future.
It’s nice to hear, then, that Apple is looking to put Siri to work transcribing your voicemails.
Business Insider says that Apple is testing a new voicemail service called iCloud Voicemail, and it could mean that you never have to listen to a stupid voicemail ever again.
Here is how it works: When someone using iCloud Voicemail is unable to take a call, Siri will answer instead of letting the call go to a standard digital audio recorder.
iCloud Voicemail can relay information about where you are and why you can’t pick up the phone to certain people. But the coolest feature of the service is that Siri will transcribe any incoming voicemails, just as it does with anything else you say to it.
Apple sends voice data to company servers, where Siri converts the words spoken into text. iCloud Voicemail will presumably function in the same way, sending the raw voicemails to Apple, and Siri will then transcribe them and make them available on your iPhone.
Meaning Apple will send you a text version of any audio messages recorded by iCloud voicemail.
And hopefully, that text is accurate. Apple’s far from the first company (Google) to offer voicemail transcription – but the technology is far from perfect.
Apple employees are currently testing this internally, and it’s not ready for primetime. The report indicates it could launch next year, around the time iOS 10 would be arriving.
