Record and Automatically Transcribe Calls

Your phone has finally gained the ability to record and transcribe conversations using the native Phone app. All I need to demo this is for a phone call to come in, perhaps from my wife… Oh, there we go! I’ll answer that one now.

In the top left corner of the call screen, you’re now going to see this new Record button. When you tap on it, the recipient and yourself will both hear a message: This call will be recorded—to alert everyone to the fact that the call is being recorded. You can’t stop this message from playing, and it’s really important that it does, just so everyone knows the call is being monitored and recorded. It’s a bit like when you join a Zoom meeting and someone presses Record.

Once that’s done, you can carry on the call as normal with this little audio waveform in the middle of the screen like this. With the call recording, I can continue as usual. I could hang up the call and that would end the recording, or if I wanted to stop the recording first, I could press Stop before hanging up—it really doesn’t matter how you do this.

Then, when the call is finished, the recording will automatically be saved into the Notes app. So, let’s quickly jump into Notes, and here you’ll see there’s a new call recording between myself and Sapphy Woolcock. Tapping on it lets you play back the call so you can hear the conversation again. Or, if you tap onto the actual call itself, you can see the transcript—you can see who spoke and what they said.

This is a pretty accurate call recording transcript. It’s not 100% perfect, as you can see from this, but it’s a really good start. And if you’ve got Apple Intelligence on your device, you’ll also get a summary of that call, so you can see at a glance what was discussed. Because it’s in Notes, if you search your iPhone and the search phrase appears in a transcript, that note will show up as a suggestion.

There are so many uses for this feature, and I’m really excited that it’s now finally part of iOS 18. But that’s not all that’s new on your phone. I’ve spent my summer playing with iOS 18, and I’ve made a ton of QuickTip videos on my channel down below. But excitingly, I’ve also written my first eBook! I’ve called it 100 QuickTips for iOS 18, and if you follow the link below, I promise you’re going to find things you never knew your phone could do now that you’ve updated to iOS 18. I’ll see you next time!