Voicemail allows your friends to leave you voice messages when you are not available. And you can set up Visual Voicemail on your iPhone to easily listen and manage your voicemail list on iPhone. In iOS 10, Apple introduced a new voicemail transcription feature that helps you transfer your voicemails into texts, so you can check your voice messages without need of playing the audio on iPhone 6s/6s Plus and iPhone 7/ 7 Plus.
It is certain that voicemail transcription is a very handy service when it’s not convenient for us to listen to the voicemails. However, it also creates problems in some instances. Sometimes, the transcriptions are so far off from the real meaning and it won’t let you to play back your voicemail once you hear a voicemail. Therefore, many people want to turn off voicemail transcription on iPhone.
How to Turn Off Voicemail Transcription on iPhone
Actually the voicemail transcription feature is still in Beta and there is no option for us to disable voicemail transcription in the current build. But there is a workaround can prevent your voicemails from transcribing.
1. Go to Settings > Siri > Language.
2. Transcription only supports U.S English and Canadian English at this stage, so you can change Siri language to disable voicemail transcription service on your iPhone. You can change Siri language to Australian English or one of other English offered (except U.S English and Canadian English).
You can also change Siri language to Japanese, German or some other language that doesn’t sound like English, but then Siri won’t understand anything you say.
3. After doing this, your iPhone will no longer transcribe your voicemails. And if you select a voicemail message, it will only show “Transcription Unavailable”.
How to Fix Voicemail Issues on iPhone 7/6s/6/SE/5s/5
If the transcription is unavailable but you still cannot listen to your voicemails on iPhone, open the voicemail then click on the share button at the top, and send the voicemail to yourself via iMessage. Then you are able to play the recording in iMessage.
In addition, you can also read: How to fix voicemail won’t play on iPhone to troubleshoot iPhone voicemail issues.