This feature is very confusing to me. But I think I may understand it now. So, if you don't answer your phone or press anything on your phone, it'll just go to VM like normal. But, if you see the call you can send the call to live VM, and it intercepts the regular VM and "screens" the caller. They are prompted to speak and you will see what they say on the phone and can choose to answer or not. When it worked it was pretty cool. Just don't know how often I'd actually use it. This would have been a really great feature like 8 years ago lol
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Is Apple's iOS 17 Live Voicemail Feature Too Confusing?
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Close. All calls will go to Live Voicemail if it's enabled — both those you decline and those you ignore — as long as your iPhone has coverage to receive them.
It's like a built-in answering machine on your iPhone; your carrier's voicemail is only used as a fallback if your iPhone is out of coverage, but if you have Visual Voicemail, all messages will appear on the same list in your Phone app.
Calls you ignore are still handled by Live Voicemail, but those may not be as obvious. For privacy reasons, they won't appear on your lock screen unless you unlock your iPhone and select the voicemail indicator in the Dynamic Island (I'm not sure how this works on non-DI-equipped iPhone models).
I get calls from unknown numbers multiple times a day. It's actually gotten worse as the years progress.
I thought that's how I understood from the release of it. However, I have been on beta from the beginning, and even after the official iOS17 release, it hasn't worked this way for me. I have only seen the written part of the message on my phone when i clicked a button on my phone to ignore the call.
I get a lot of spam and unknown calls, and I expect to see them show up and read what they say in the message but I never do. A few moments after not answering the call, i get an alert that I have a new VM though, without having seen the live VM feature on them.
If you have "Silence Unknown Callers" enabled, then anybody who isn't in your address book will be sent straight to Live Voicemail without ringing your iPhone. However, it should still be Live Voicemail transcribing that message, and you should see an indicator of some kind... On my iPhone 14 Pro Max, a voicemail icon shows up in the Dynamic Island that I can tap on to see the transcription; on iPhones without Dynamic Island it appears in the top-right corner of the status bar, over the time or carrier indicator.
However, calls from blocked numbers and those detected as spam by a spam filtering service or app won't be picked up by Live Voicemail; they're sent directly to your carrier voicemail (if you have that setup).
Not sure if this is a good place to ask this question. I did not want to start a new thread.
I'm trying to adjust the time it takes for Live Voicemail to automatically answer incoming calls, but I can't find anything in settings.
Currently, Live Voicemail activates after around 15 to 20 seconds, which is not long enough for me to even get to my phone.
I'm trying to adjust the time it takes for Live Voicemail to automatically answer incoming calls, but I can't find anything in settings.
Currently, Live Voicemail activates after around 15 to 20 seconds, which is not long enough for me to even get to my phone.
That's set by your carrier, and is not configurable as far as I know. Live voicemail answers at the same time as normal voicemail did. You probably don't want your phone to just ring for 60 seconds anyway.
Thanks. I wasn't sure if I maybe just could not find the setting.
60 seconds is too long, I agree. 15 seconds is too short though. I'll just leave it turned off then.
Live Voicemail likely has to answer the call at least 1-2 seconds before the configured carrier CCF setting because the carrier voicemail will pick up when your phone is out of service or unable to answer the call. The phone has to beat the network to answering the call before the timeout.
The CCF setting for busy/reject should be viewable on any network that supports traditional USSD dialer codes with *#67# and no answer would be *#62#.
That's a good assumption, but I just meant that you can't have it wait longer than the carrier voicemail... and even if you thought you wanted it to, you probably don't want it to.