Feature Request: Make iPhone voice transcription a universal feature

iPhone voice transcription is already included in iMessage, and is available in some other chat apps – but not always for free. In Telegram, for example, you have to pay for a premium membership to get the feature.

The latest Bloomberg piece says that Apple is finally bringing audio transcription to the Voice Memo app, and this seems a perfect opportunity to make it a system-wide feature …

My love/hate relationship with voice notes

I wasn’t initially a fan of voice notes, but have come to grudgingly admit that they have their uses.

Their asynchronous nature means they can be more convenient than phone calls, allowing each party to listen and speak when it’s convenient to them. For trickier or more complex discussions, it can be helpful to have the opportunity to review a message before sending, with the option to re-record. It may be important to hear the tone of voice. And, of course, sometimes it’s just nice to hear someone.

But where they can be frustrating is when you’re having a text chat with someone and they switch to voice notes. There may be perfectly good reason for that – they may be walking down the street, for example, and not have time to stop and type – but it can still be a nuisance to receive one.

If I’m in a quiet place, with people around me, I may need to dig out headphones just to listen to the message, or do that thing where you hold the speaker close to your ear and try to find the sweet-spot where it’s loud enough to hear without disturbing anyone else.

Additionally, while you can quickly and easily refer back to written messages – either by quickly scrolling back up or using the search feature – you can’t do the same with voice notes.

iPhone voice transcription would solve this

When using iMessage, transcriptions are completely automatic, being displayed with both incoming and outgoing messages, making it as convenient to review voice notes as text messages. This is something I’d like to see as a universal feature on iPhone, so it’s automatically supported in all apps.

Now seems the perfect time to do this. Apple is now diving into AI in a big way, and this includes transcription in the Voice Memo app, so I’d love to see the company take the extra step and make it system-wide.

It would, of course, need to be an option, so we can switch it on and off as desired. Personally I rather like the Telegram Premium UI, where it doesn’t happen automatically but you just tap an A icon to transcribe a message.

Is universal audio transcription a feature you’d like to see? Please take our poll, and share your thoughts in the comments.

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