Apple's digital assistant Siri will soon have the ability to not only answer your phone calls, but also transcribe your voice messages as the company is reportedly working on a service that will enable the same.
The news comes courtesy of publication Business Insiders' sources who revealed that the alleged service was in testing and is poised for a 2016 launch. The publication heard about Apple employees using the new voicemail service a couple of weeks ago.
"Apple employees are testing a voicemail service which uses Siri to answer your calls and transcribe voicemail messages. Apple's iCloud service will then send you the text of the transcribed voicemail - meaning that you'll never need to listen to your voicemails again, sources tell Business Insider," notes the publication.
So in the near future if you don't wish to pick up a call on your iPhone or are inaccessible, Siri will respond on your behalf with a personalized message. In tandem with this, Apple will also deploy iCloud Voicemail - a new service - which will transcribe the voicemail to text, which can be read later by the user. iCloud Voicemail will also pack-in the ability to relay information on where a user is and why they are unable to attend to the call to select people.
How will this entire process operate you wonder? Per the publication, Apple will likely transfer the voice data to its servers where Siri will convert the spoken words into text. The iCloud Voicemail will also send the voice messages to Apple's servers and Siri will transcript these as well into text.
Presently, once instructed, Siri is able to play a user's voicemail messages so that one does not have to access them manually. However, the option of viewing the voicemail as text messages will be welcomed by iDevice users as there would be no need to play or replay them.
Currently, Google Voice offers voicemail transcription abilities and with competition growing, Apple is looking to innovate and add new features to Siri. Microsoft's Cortana too is slated to be available for iOS and Apple looks to be pulling up its socks to ensure users stay loyal to Siri.
If the intended transcription service is reliable and accurate then Apple could well be on to another winner. It is anticipated that Apple will roll out the feature when it pushes out iOS 10 in 2016.
Photo: Karlis Dambrans | Flickr
