Tech

Apple will save you from listening to long rambling voicemails

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Craig Federighi
Apple SVP Craig Federighi  Alexei Oreskovic

Apple exec Craig Federighi announced a new iPhone feature that will make scanning your voicemails much easier. 

The company's new version of iOS will include voicemail transcriptions, Federighi said on stage at the WWDC conference in San Francisco on Monday. 

Instead of listening to long, rambling voicemails, you'll be able to see text transcriptions of the new messages in your voicemail inbox. That could save a lot of time.

Business Insider first reported that such a feature was in the works back in August.

This is something that Google has offered to users of its Google Voice service for years. But the ability to have audio transcriptions of voicemails directly integrated into the iPhone could be especially useful. 

The service will only be as useful as the technology's speech recognition capabilities. Some of these technologies are famous for making comical mistakes, especially when it comes to recognizing and transcribing unfamiliar or difficult names. 

Apple noted in the presentation that the feature is still in beta, but did not provide any other details. We should have a better sense in the months ahead of how well this feature actually performs in real life. 

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Alexei Oreskovic is the Tech Features Editor for the Business section of Insider.  Based in San Francisco, Oreskovic has covered technology and business for more than 20 years at publications including TheStreet.com, the Industry Standard, and CNET. Before BI, he was a correspondent at Reuters for six years, where he was a finalist for the 2013 Gerald Loeb Award in the Breaking News category for coverage of the Facebook IPO.  As Insider's Tech Features Editor, Oreskovic has overseen groundbreaking investigative stories on Uber, Snapchat, Tesla, Facebook and Google. He was the editor on the Snapchat and Facebook stories that won the Sabew 2018 Larry Birger Young Business Journalist award for former BI reporter Alex Heath. Oreskovic has covered the booms and busts of the tech industry since the first dotcom bubble of the late 1990s, and has interviewed the industry's most important players including Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer. He has made frequent guest appearances on TV and radio, including CNBC and BBC World News.  Disclosure: Oreskovic has a direct family member who owns shares in Compass.