A report published today claims that Apple employees are internally testing a new voicemail service which allows the Siri digital personal assistant to answer calls for a user and transcribe voicemail messages. The iCloud service would then be used to send users the text of that transcribed voicemail which effectively means that you will never have to listen to your voicemail messages again.
Business Insider reports that the service is going to be called iCloud Voicemail and it will allow Siri to answer the call if the user is unable to or doesn’t want to. This would prevent the call from going to a standard digital audio recorder, instead iCloud Voicemail will be able to deliver custom messages about where you are and why you can’t pick up the phone to select people.
The “coolest feature” of this service is said to be its ability to transcribe voicemail messages, Siri already transcribes all of the commands that you give it so transcribing voicemail messages isn’t going to be terribly hard for it. The voice data will be sent to Apple’s servers where Siri will transcribe spoken words into text and send them to you.
Just don’t expect iCloud Voicemail to arrive with iOS 9. BI says that while multiple employees are testing it this service is scheduled for release in 2016 which means it will probably be a part of iOS 10.