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Get Your iPhone to Ask Callers Who They Are Before You Answer
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HappyMBAowner
macrumors regular
This is so useless unfortunately. Particularly for medical calls and banks or credit cards security calls (which are of paramount importance). Your phone won't ring and you'll miss important calls. I did activate it for a while and removed this option when I found out I missed two important calls.
kalsta
macrumors 68000
Um, if this is happening to you, it means your ‘friend’ doesn’t have you listed in their contacts.
kalsta
macrumors 68000
Honestly, I think this is a great feature. Since our governments and telcos have failed to address this monstrous issue, I’m relieved that our phone makers have finally found a way.
The biggest issue I have with Apple’s implementation is how hidden the setting is. I don’t enjoy clicking through all those levels to turn this on and off—which I do if I’m expecting a call from a government agency or someone who calls from a silent number. (Yeah, frustrating that our government agencies do this, but what can you do.)
The biggest issue I have with Apple’s implementation is how hidden the setting is. I don’t enjoy clicking through all those levels to turn this on and off—which I do if I’m expecting a call from a government agency or someone who calls from a silent number. (Yeah, frustrating that our government agencies do this, but what can you do.)
It got so bad for me I had to put it on auto silence for unknown callers. Thankfully iOS 26 provides a middle ground.
Fake AI generated women and AI generated voicemails to get through voicemail screening. Great. This dystopia sucks.
Be careful with this feature. Around here healthcare, emergency services and government departments don't have Caller ID.
You'd hate to miss a call from a hospital telling you some lab results or that your family member is in ER.
You'd hate to miss a call from a hospital telling you some lab results or that your family member is in ER.
Apple_Robert
Contributor
I use this feature and it is rare to have a spam call get through. I really like that I don’t have to keep my phone on silent anymore.
Gasu E.
macrumors 603
Exactly right. I tried this, but had to turn it off because of this.
Gasu E.
macrumors 603
Callbacks from a doctor's office, callbacks from a customer service line, calls from food delivery people confused about your address-- no, they don't bother, they just leave a message. And that means you have to go through the entire process again, this time with the feature turned off. At first, I thought this was a great feature, but I had to disable it, because I stopped getting callbacks.
Kevin Palser
macrumors member
I’ve only experienced one problem, which I’ll explain in the continuation below. I used to get 1-3 interruptions at office hours from spam calls. Now I get none. The feature seems to have worked correctly for my son’s school or genuine businesses answering the automated prompt and me being alerted in time to take the calls.
The problem: The feature seems to be language restricted. As soon as I switched the device language to my other usual less international language, the setting is not shown. Even if it did work I should want a sub setting to still select English as the prompt language for unknown callers.
The problem: The feature seems to be language restricted. As soon as I switched the device language to my other usual less international language, the setting is not shown. Even if it did work I should want a sub setting to still select English as the prompt language for unknown callers.
Kevin Palser
macrumors member
Not that I have seen. My experience is that it hides the setting when I did not have my device language set to English. That said, I was using what is deemed as a “minority language”. Maybe you will have better luck but I think it is mainstream languages only and purely based on your current device language at this stage.
Agreed, so many great impressive physical and technological marvels have been done over the decades (although seems a lot less lately, we have plateau’ed) and yet spam/phishing/scam/robo calls haven’t been solved.
I don’t believe it, has to be on purpose and from the inside to be allowed.
Student of Life
macrumors 65816
You do realize that in each example provided they will leave you a voice mail message stating who they are, a general overview of what the call is about and that you should call them back for more information. It’s not some situation where they will just hang up without tell you that information.
Juicy Box
macrumors 604
I might update to the newer iOS for this.
The amount of spam calls I get in a day are so bad, I thought about getting a new phone mobile number after having the same number since the 2000's. They started about 7-8 months ago, and I get at least 5, but up to two dozen a day. I tried answering and hanging up. I tried blocking the numbers (I have hundreds blocked) They all leave voicemails which I then have to go through, block numbers, then delete. It is disruptive.
I was looking into paid apps that claim to screen phone numbers for scam calls, but this iOS feature might be a way to at least deal with them.
My question is, if you "decline", does it send to voicemail? I hope it doesn't, but curious how it works.
Also, if you do not respond, does it send the caller to Voicemail, and how does "ask for more information" work?
The amount of spam calls I get in a day are so bad, I thought about getting a new phone mobile number after having the same number since the 2000's. They started about 7-8 months ago, and I get at least 5, but up to two dozen a day. I tried answering and hanging up. I tried blocking the numbers (I have hundreds blocked) They all leave voicemails which I then have to go through, block numbers, then delete. It is disruptive.
I was looking into paid apps that claim to screen phone numbers for scam calls, but this iOS feature might be a way to at least deal with them.
My question is, if you "decline", does it send to voicemail? I hope it doesn't, but curious how it works.
Also, if you do not respond, does it send the caller to Voicemail, and how does "ask for more information" work?
True but I’ve noticed that I don’t get any spam voicemails anymore as this feature seems to somehow stop that.
Radeon85
macrumors 68000
Works just fine in the UK, has done since day one. I just love that I don't have to answer anymore calls, just let the phone answer them for me, and I'll get back to them later when I want to.