One of iPhone’s most useful new features has launched in South Africa

Live Voicemail has become available to iPhone users in South Africa and several other countries with the rollout of iOS 18.

First launched with iOS 17, Live Voicemail offers a form of call screening for cellular phone calls.

With Live Voicemail enabled, supported iPhones intercept calls before they can be forwarded to your operator’s voicemail service.

Users can also send calls to Live Voicemail by tapping the voicemail button on the incoming call alert screen.

By tapping on the screen and unlocking the device, users can access a live transcription of the call and have the option to pick up.

The caller can’t hear you, and you can’t hear them unless you answer the call.

With the current surge in spam calls, features like Live Voicemail are an invaluable tool to filter out unwanted calls from people who are not in your address book.

When Apple announced the feature last year, it assured that transcriptions happen on-device using the iPhone chip’s Neural Engine.

Unlike many other speech-to-text services, Apple said calls are not sent to its servers for processing — a boon for the privacy-conscious.

However, users do have the option to give feedback on individual transcriptions, while requires sending the audio to Apple for analysis.

Past messages and transcriptions can be accessed from the Voicemail tab in the Phone app, where users can also record a custom greeting.

If the iPhone is switched off or doesn’t have a signal, calls go to your network provider’s regular voicemail service. Otherwise, they go to Live Voicemail.

Standard call rates and charges apply when Live Voicemail answers a call on your behalf.

For that reason, it won’t pick up calls while roaming. A call will only be sent to Live Voicemail while roaming if you tap the voicemail button.

Initially, Live Voicemail was only available in North America.

However, when iOS 18 launched in September, the feature began rolling out in several new countries, including South Africa.

Languages supported now include English, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese.

iOS 18 is supported from the iPhone XS and XR, iPhone 11, and newer devices. It also runs on the second-generation iPhone SE.

However, several iOS 18 features are only available on iPhone 12 and newer devices.

iOS 18.1 introduced Apple Intelligence, which is restricted to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16.

Apple has said that a South African English localisation for Apple Intelligence will launch in December.

Apple is not the only smartphone maker offering a feature like Live Voicemail in South Africa.

Samsung smartphones have a similar feature called Bixby Text Call, a text-to-speech agent that can answer and transcribe calls on the user’s behalf.

Like Live Voicemail, the user can pick up the call at any time.

However, unlike Live Voicemail, a copy of the audio is not stored on the device — only the transcription.

Bixby Text Call also lets the user communicate with the caller through text messages that are turned into speech on the fly.

This is great for taking a call in a meeting or public place without disturbing the people around you, and a great accessibility feature for people who can’t speak.

Bixby Text Call runs on all Samsung smartphones with One UI 5.1 and newer, which launched with the Samsung Galaxy S23 range. It also runs on budget devices like the Samsung Galaxy A34.

One UI 5.1 is supported on the Galaxy Z Flip, Galaxy S10 Lite, Galaxy Note 10 Lite, Galaxy A32, Galaxy A51, and Galaxy A71 and newer.

However, it should be noted that some smartphone software updates are not available everywhere in the world.

MyBroadband contacted Apple for comment regarding the launch of Live Voicemail in South Africa, but the company did not respond by publication.