Neil Hughes
Apple is reportedly testing a service that will have its voice driven personal assistant, Siri, answer phone calls when a user is unavailable and then transcribe voicemails to text so that they can be quickly read.
Apple's so-called "iCloud Voicemail" feature is said to be in the works for a 2016 launch, according to Business Insider. When an iPhone owner is unavailable, Siri will answer the call and can share information, such as where the recipient is and why they can't take the call.
Employees at Apple are said to be testing the feature currently, though it isn't expected to launch until next year, presumably with an iOS 10 upgrade.
With an iCloud Voicemail service, Apple would bypass carrier voicemail altogether, offering its own alternative. When the first iPhone debuted in 2007, Apple's proprietary Visual Voicemail feature was one of the main selling points of the product.
AppleInsider first detailed Apple's concept for a smart call waiting system in 2012 through a patent filing. The invention described a system that would tell an incoming caller what the user is doing, and then translate their voicemail into text.
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36 Comments
Why can't it do this now? Pretty much every VOIP operator has a voice-to-text conversion for voicemail. There is nothing special about it. But it works. How is it that Apple can make this wait until 2016, and probably bill it as a major feature? Like everything else...its probably not "doing it" thats the problem....its "doing it for hundreds of millions of users all day everyday". EDIT: I'm only talking about the voice-to-text aspect. Not the rest of the far more advanced feature.
[quote name="pmz" url="/t/187457/apples-enhanced-siri-will-answer-phone-calls-transcribe-voicemails-in-2016-report#post_2755965"]Why can't it do this now? Pretty much every VOIP operator has a voice-to-text conversion for voicemail. There is nothing special about it. But it works. How is it that Apple can make this wait until 2016, and probably bill it as a major feature? Like everything else...its probably not "doing it" thats the problem....its "doing it for hundreds of millions of users all day everyday".[/quote] What will make Apple's version unique is telling the caller[B] why[/B] he/she can't take the call at the moment. The current ones don't do that AFAIK.
One step closer to the Knowledge Navigator video. "Your wife called. I didn't tell her you were lunching with your secretary but you'd better call her ASAP.'
"Why can't it do this now? Pretty much every VOIP operator has a voice-to-text conversion for voicemail. " Ummm, you do know that the iPhone takes real calls, not VOIP, and thus it's a little complicated to move away from a carrier phone connection to Siri? Unlike VOIP which has the advantage of already being web based. You are talking about VOIP, which few folks use but you do, and not answering normal phone calls, which is where the great bulk of the population lives by phone. Apples and oranges really. And thus I think it's great, where you think it's ho-hum.
I would prefer that Siri first better support more languages. I get calls in English, French and Dutch. How will Siri cope with that, taking into account that its support for French is only moderate and the support for Dutch really sucks