What is Dial Assist for iPhone?

It is not in p. 48 which is about Siri. Dial assist appears only once in this document on p. 57. There it only says:

"Make calls to your contacts and favorites while traveling abroad. (GSM) Go to Settings > Phone, then turn on Dial Assist. Dial Assist automatically adds the prefix or country code for calls to the U.S."

This is clear as mud if you see dial assist and you are not calling the US.

I have dial assist appearing as I usually put in the full tel number (country and areas codes) for my contacts that I tend to call from different countries and when I am in the same country as the said contact with the full prefix I get dial assist showing up. When I remove the country code I don't get the dial assist.

Any explanation welcome.

First off, when that thread was answered and I posted, it was almost 4 years ago, a different version of iOS, so a different User Guide. At the time I posted, that was the correct page. You are looking at a User Guide for a newer iOS, and with additional features, the page numbers have changed.

Second, if you used my link and opened a User Guide from the US, then it would make the statement about calling outside the US. I do not make international calls, so I'm not aware of how it would look outside the US, but if you have already inserted full country codes in your address book, it is not necessary to have Dial Assist turned on. That would only be necessary if you are calling outside of the country you are located in.

I think what is confusing here is determining whether dial assist is an Apple product or a cellular network product. For instance, in dealing a US number from the Netherlands using a T-Mobile account, the presumption is that DialAssist would put a + 1 in front of the number automatically. But this does not happen in leading to the question of the Sim card and who is cellular service provider. Dial Assist works correctly in the EU placing properly the prefix in calling another European country or the United Kingdom, but does not work correctly with US numbers, opposite of what is suggested in the booklet. I just spent hours with joint venture discussing this issue, which in turn led to speaking with T-Mobile for additional hour; and that's what I came up with -- no real good answer.

As I have just gotten an iPhone for the first time, (been using an android based phone) I was trying to learn if the phone had a similar feature to my android known there as "prefix dialing" whereas, you could specify a given prefix, and all manually dialed calls would use that prefix (specifically the area code) for your dialed calls.

Well, after looking into this "Dial Assist", it's just a theory, hopefully someone can validate or correct me here... wait, nope, I just tested my theory and debunked it.

I thought maybe Dial Assist, read your personal phone number (with area code) then maybe applied that code to any manually dialed call but no, that's not it either.

I found that when I manually dialed a number, somehow, the area code is applied but not shown (i.e. the AC doesn't appear in the dialed number seq.).

So I then turned off Dial Assist... but am still able to dial without manually dialing the area code.

So, the issue I initially had... isn't an issue after all, although I would like to know how to change that if I needed.

But I too, still don't know what "Dial assist" is for.

I should mention that the reason I was was looking/asking about the auto prefixing... a few years ago, due to dwindling number availability due to VoIP and number portability, AT&T made us start dialing our own area code, not to mention creating AC overlaps. As 90% of my calling is with my home area code, I wanted the "auto prefix thing" which it would appear... is mystically available already!!??!!

Would still be nice to better understand this "Dial Assist" though.

-Dave

Check out the User Guide http://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1565/en_US/iphone_user_guide.pdf and information about Dial Assist is on page 48.

Tnx for clarifying ChrisJ4203.