iPhone users should stop paying for visual voicemail with the big telcos Rogers, Telus, and Bell, as the free Live Voicemail feature from iOS 17 can save you money every month. This is a public service announcement to review your monthly cellphone bill and to leverage Apple’s free and better voicemail service that debuted in the fall.
Rogers currently charges $9 per month for Premium Visual Voicemail, allowing up to 35 voice messages. Telus offers its visual voicemail service at $5 per month, while Bell charges $8 per month for a similar service. Live Voicemail in iOS 17 offers superior functionality at no extra charge.
The Live Voicemail feature in iOS 17 is a significant upgrade over the traditional visual voicemail that first debuted with the original iPhone in 2007. It requires a data connection and the phone to be on, but for most users, this won’t be a limitation.
Live Voicemail provides real-time transcription of messages as they are being left, offering immediate insight into the nature of the call on your Lockscreen. Users have the option to answer the call while the voicemail is being recorded, in real-time (this usually freaks people out), like back in the good ol’ days of landlines.
To enable or disable Live Voicemail, iPhone users can navigate to the Settings app, tap on ‘Phone’, and then ‘Live Voicemail’. By default, this feature is turned on in iOS 17 and later. When Live Voicemail is active, the phone automatically picks up calls to capture the voicemail, with the caller unaware.
Currently, Live Voicemail is only available in English in the United States and Canada. Users can send incoming calls directly to Live Voicemail or find transcriptions in the Voicemail tab of the Phone app. These transcriptions remain available as long as the voicemail is kept in the inbox.
If users experience issues with conditional call forwarding or cannot decline incoming calls, turning off Live Voicemail is recommended to continue using the carrier’s call forwarding features.
Live Voicemail offers a more modern, efficient and free voicemail for iPhone users.
Some wireless users on legacy plans, who can’t be bothered to change their cellphone services, are likely still paying for visual voicemail when it’s no longer necessary (only leave me a voicemail if you’re on fire). Check your bills.
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I use live voicemail exclusively now. Way better than traditional voicemail.
This article is correct, but I don’t think explains all the potential reasons you wound use this… or still want VVM…
Your phone has to be connected for the Live VM to work, so people in rural areas may prefer not to have it. It also doesn’t work when roaming (so Apple’s docs seem to state). What that means for Canadian roaming I am not sure.
Also, Fizz (which is in beta in some places right now, but is Videotron’s flanker carrier in Quebec) gives VVM for free.
Just a few caveats and notes that I felt should have been mentioned.
It will fallback to regular voicemail in those very rare case… So it’s not an issue at all
For some people this case happens up to 50% of the time. I know somebody where a glitch in the custom message system made the caller hear two different VM messages depending on which VM it went to.
Apple nor Freedom could fix it. Remember, it doesn’t work when roaming so for a Fizz beta or Freedom user, it can go to voicemail quite a lot. Maybe people may not realize and miss an important message.
For some people this is a non-issue because it is rare, but for some it happens a lot and is a significant issue.
that’s the reason I don’t understand why Canadians celebrate on news of apple supporting RCS soon.
the day Apple rollout RCS support for iPhone will be the day your carriers start charging a premium for that
Not sure how you think this, as it’s already a thing on Android devices, and free to boot, to my understanding anyway?
This is Canada though where companies get to charge for anything and not be held accountable, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they somehow found a loophole. I know I won’t be getting it for my iPhone if they charge.
the reason RCS is free today in Canada is because Apple’s lack of support makes RCS is half useful so Canadian carrier doesn’t charge a premium for it yet.
Once Apple starts to support RCS guess what will happen to it?
look at what happened to visual voice mail 10 years ago
Pretty much. If only Android users use it, it’s basically beta and effectively useless. Certainly nothing they could charge for.
Not sure they’d be able to get anyone to pay for it, even if Apple supported it. If they did, Apple users would stop using it and it goes back to being worthless.
They arent going to charge, its just the successor of SMS/MMS, its not 2002 anymore
If your phone needs to be on for it to work, it defeats the purpose IMO. I have VVM with Rogers but don’t pay for it. I find it’s one of the easier things to get a credit for when negociating with loyalty. Best of both worlds methinks.
It will fallback to regular voicemail for the once in a blue moon where your phone is off…
I use live voicemail and visual voicemail. I get it for free with my Telus plan. Would definitely not pay for it.
Thanks for taking the tip Gary!
The big three need to stop charging for features other companies engineer! Scam artists
The problem is live visual voicemail is only available in english, so if your iPhone is set to french or any other language it will not work at all and knowing Apple, I don’t expect them to support other languages anytime soon. They still don’t support text transcription for the regular visual voicemail in other language as well and this feature is there since like 2017.
Anyway nowadays, you can easily negotiate visual voicemail for free if you’re a loyal costumer. That’s what I did.
This. After all these years, French Siri still can’t detect I speak English, making it useless to me when responding to text messages from some friends via CarPlay (it just spits out gibberish). [And yes, my English is quite good]
As far as I can tell, Canadian carriers were the only ones in the world to charge for VVM. I had it for a few years when it first came out but as calls became less and less common, I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for it or any premium VM. Other than Chinese spam, how many VMs does anyone get these days?
If necessary, when I travel I forward all calls to my Fongo number and then I can check for any VMs there (or answer the calls over data/wifi).
This is just simply not true. Live Voicemail is not better than Visual Voicemail in any way. Visual Voicemail provides ALL the features of Live Voicemail, plus two additional features which are not available with Live. Only Visual Voicemail works when the phone is not reachable, and only with Visual Voicemail can the user have a custom greeting. On the other hand, there is not a single feature or benefit that Live Voicemail has the Visual Voicemail lacks. It is categorically false to say that Live Voicemail offers “superior” functionality to Visual Voicemail.
It is definitely true the Live Voicemail is better than regular carrier voicemail. But Live Voicemail is in no way newer, better, or more modern than Visual Voicemail. One could make the argument that Live Voicemail offers much of the same features as Visual Voicemail, but without a price. But to say that it’s even at feature-parity let alone superior is objectively, patently inaccurate.
I seem to have an option to switch between the “Default” Siri greeting, and recording a custom one with Live Voicemail (I do not subscribe to Visual Voicemail. My voicemail is still call-in). The option appeared somewhat recently, so I don’t know what prompted the change. Additionally, Live Voicemail offers transcription and screening functionality, which is technically separate from the Visual Voicemail offering.
Nice, which carrier is that with? Also you do not lose the transcription and screening functionality with Visual Voicemail; it is also included. Maybe you already knew that but this article makes it sound like one loses features by having Visual Voicemail, which isn’t accurate
Yes, there is a bug that may be fixed now (I haven’t heard anyone else running into it) where the Live VM custom message doesn’t work… but generally that is not a missing feature.
You can change your greeting in Live VM just like Visual VM.
It doesn’t seem to be that simple unfortunately. Before iOS 17.2, I don’t think it was possible at all to have a custom greeting with Live Voicemail. As of 17.2, I believe it technically is possible, but almost zero carriers support that feature. AFAIK Telus, Rogers and Bell all don’t support it. I can’t share links here but if you google “apple live voicemail telus support” the top hit support article describes it in detail. If you know anything different please share, as info is opaque on this topic! Or please lmk if you know of any carriers which have added support for custom greetings with Live Voicemail as of iOS 17.2
You ignored the main feature of Live Voicemail, the LIVE part where voicemails are transcribed on screen in real time and you can pick up the call as they’re leaving a message, or see that it’s a scam call and choose to ignore it.
Visual Voicemail has everything else but that.
That’s not accurate. Visual Voicemail was upgraded to support all the Live Voicemail features when Live Voicemail was released with iOS 17. Visual Voicemail is an enhancement of Live Voicemail that makes it even better. There are no features that are part of Live Voicemail that aren’t part of Visual Voicemail.
I guess this is a discussion of semantics now that I think about it. The live transcription feature itself IS Live Voicemail. Everything else LV does is simply additional functionality copied from Visual Voicemail. Visual Voicemail itself doesn’t have call screening but it is compatible with Live Voicemail which allows it to call screen with iOS 17. You need to have both LV and VVM enabled to get all the features.
Been paying Rogers for this for a decade, thanks for the tip.
I’m with fizz and had this feature enabled since the very start. I don’t think I’ve ever had a call go to visual voicemail, ever. It just goes to voicemail.
Fizz offers VVM for free, I believe.
That utterly Irrelevant to what I described. I even mentioned fizz in an effort to dissuade people from replying with dumb comments about it possibly not being available to me.
Yep, and for $5 a month for Canada and USA data… fizz is really going to take over.