Apple will save you from listening to long rambling voicemails (AAPL)

Alexei Oreskovic

Apple exec Craig Federighi announced a new iPhone feature that will make scanning your voicemails much easier. 

The company's new version of iOS will include voicemail transcriptions, Federighi said on stage at the WWDC conference in San Francisco on Monday. 

Instead of listening to long, rambling voicemails, you'll be able to see text transcriptions of the new messages in your voicemail inbox. That could save a lot of time.

Business Insider first reported that such a feature was in the works back in August.

This is something that Google has offered to users of its Google Voice service for years. But the ability to have audio transcriptions of voicemails directly integrated into the iPhone could be especially useful. 

The service will only be as useful as the technology's speech recognition capabilities. Some of these technologies are famous for making comical mistakes, especially when it comes to recognizing and transcribing unfamiliar or difficult names. 

Apple noted in the presentation that the feature is still in beta, but did not provide any other details. We should have a better sense in the months ahead of how well this feature actually performs in real life. 

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