iPhone Visual Voicemail transcription not working?

Adding my observations for my iPhone 8 Plus -

Problem:

Visual Voicemail Transcriptions were not working.

Siri Language was set to "English (United Kingdom)"

Fix:

Switched Siri language to "English (United States)" and voicemail transcriptions started working.

Listen for "Hey Siri" is still disabled

I was having this problem and tried EVERYTHING. What ended up being wrong with mine was that the language in my “Siri & Search” settings was set to English (New Zealand). It needs to be set to “English (United States)” for VM transcription to work. Once you change it, all future messages you receive will be transcribed.

I personally have dealt with this problem on my iPhone for a few months now. My problem’s been solved. There seems to be some confusion in this string, as well as others that I visited.

“Visual Voicemail” is simply the list that appears of your voicemail which contains the name or number of the person leaving the voicemail along with the date and time. You can “Visually” see that it’s there. This is, Carrier based.

When you tap on a particular voicemail to open it up, a typed transcription should appear for you to read. At the bottom you can listen to the voice file, you can call them back or you can go and delete the whole thing. This transcription is a feature of the phone.

It’s the transcription that stopped showing up for me and obviously, countless others. It turns out that the problem is related to Siri.

As an assistant, Siri does many things, one of which is to provide me with a typed transcription of my voicemails. My Siri was an Australian Female with an accent to die for.

It turns out, that she had a hard time understanding our American accent and this was the reason why she stopped transcribing my voicemails.

Needing to hire a different Siri, I went to “Settings” - scrolled down to “Siri & Search” (Tap) - then scrolled down to “Language” and selected “English (United States)”.

I immediately started getting my transcriptions again. The moral of the story is ...

Buy American

&

HIRE AMERICAN

🇺-1F1F8;🇺-1F1F8;🇺-1F1F8;🇺-1F1F8;🇺-1F1F8;

My husband spent hours with ATT and Apple, as well as wiping and reloading my phone, to fix the transcription problem. Nothing worked until he read a comment online somewhere about setting Siri to US English (I had thought it fun to have a UK English voice...silly me!). Once he switched that it finally worked! Nothing anyone else had suggested including resetting up VM by ATT worked. I hope that ATT and Apple can figure out this glitch and save lots of others time in the future! How do we make sure everyone knows?

THIS WORKED!!! Thank you everyone. Visual Voicemail was working. Transcription was not. Never used SIRI.

However,

1. Turn on (some option of) Siri.
2. Make sure language is US English (no idea why, but it wasn’t; it was UK English).
3. Turn off Siri.
4. Now transcription works. Yahoo!!!!

This worked! My wife had switch her Siri on her iPhone 7 to English (Australian) a while ago. She noticed sometime after that that her voicemail transcriptions weren't working. Well today we read these comments and switched it back to English (United States) --- and within a minute or two we tested it and SUCCESS --- transcriptions are working again. Thanks !!

Thanks for this thread! I noticed transcription stopped working, and finally decided to look into it. I had “Hey Siri” and Home for Siri turned off. I really didn’t want “Hey Siri”, so I turned on just Home for Siri. My voicemail transcriptions appeared immediately!

Just to see what happens, I turned Siri back off, and I still have the transcriptions. So it doesn’t seem to be a requirement, but must refresh something...

I’ve been procrastinating on one of those carrier updates - maybe that’s related? But I’m happy to have it fixed!

On iPhone turn on Siri access with Home button under Settings>Siri. Should do it.

My husband and I both had this problem and it has been SOLVED! "Hey Siri" has to be enabled for the transcription to work. I spent hours on the phone with AT&T. All of my voicemails were erased and the voicemail feature was reset. The phone was reset. All updates were done. I changed several settings and reset all network settings. Nothing helped. After my issues was escalated to the third AT&T rep, he stated it was a software issue from Apple and there was nothing that could be done about it. He stated that a lot of people have this issue and I would just have to wait until Apple fixed it on their end. One person instructed me to erase my phone! So, I called Apple. After troubleshooting for a few minutes, the rep instructed me to enable "Hey Siri". After going through the setup, all of the transcriptions appeared. I have an iPhone X and it also worked for my husband's iPhone 8. Jennifer, please spread the word to other AT&T reps. This is an easy solution and it could have saved me countless hours and I could still have my old voicemails. Kudos to you for going above and beyond to help your customers find a solution!

thesarahb wrote:

I was having this problem and tried EVERYTHING. What ended up being wrong with mine was that the language in my “Siri & Search” settings was set to English (New Zealand). It needs to be set to “English (United States)” for VM transcription to work. Once you change it, all future messages you receive will be transcribed.

I'm glad that worked for you, but I have UK English set for Siri and I get visual Transcription.

Try enabling:

Listen for"Hey Siri", found in Settings - "Siri & Search"

Allow Siri When Locked

Language-English

Well it worked for me I tried everything else I found online and turning Siri on instantly started the transcription

As I said earlier, turning on Siri solved the VM transcript issue.

The solution that worked for me was to go to

Settings

Siri & Search

check your Language (not the voice accent)

Make sure that is set to English (United States). We were on a trip to Australia and the kids decided to change the settings to English (Australian) and that's when the transcriptions stopped.

Switched it back to English (United States) and transcriptions are working again.

It won't go back and transcribe old messages, but new ones do.

Not a fix for all. I have ALWAYS had Siri (and Hey Siri) enabled since it’s release and I am still having the transcription issue. What fixed it for me was to go back to US English for her voice.