A Quick Look At Apple’s Live Voicemail Along With Some Troubleshooting Advice
One of the features that came out with iOS 17 was Live Voicemail. This basically can be described as an old school answering machine where you can take an incoming call and punt it to voice mail. Then watch a transcription of the person leaving the voice mail on your iPhone’s screen. On top of that, you can pick up the phone and talk to the person if you feel that you need to talk to them. That all sounds great, but I’ve had a number of clients have trouble with Live Voicemail. Thus I wanted to do a story on this where I talk about the main issue that I have seen in the field, as well as answering one question that I get asked on a frequent basis.
First of all, let me frame something here so that this whole discussion makes sense. Live Voicemail is a feature that is local to your iPhone. It isn’t sitting in a phone carrier’s cloud or anything like that. Thus for it to work, your iPhone has to be turned on and connected to WiFi or a cellular network. That leads to the question that I keep getting asked. Which is since this feature came out, does that mean that I can kill off my carrier’s voice mail service and save a few bucks in the process?
The answer is that it depends on your use case. If you are going to be on the Internet 99% of the time, and your phone stays on 99% of the time, then I suppose that you could do that. But here’s the catch. Remember when I said that this feature is local to your iPhone and it needs to be connected to WiFi or a cellular network, or turned on. That means that if it isn’t turned on, or connected to a cellular network, you calls will not go to voicemail. So if you depend on being able to have calls go to voice mail 100% of the time, you should not kill your carrier’s voice mail plan.
Now over to the number one issue that many of my clients have. I’ve had a surprising number of clients report that after upgrading to iOS 17, their customized voice mail greeting is gone and been replaced by a greeting that is voiced by Siri. The reason for that can be found if you go into the phone app, and then clicking on the voicemail icon at the bottom right of the screen, followed by clicking on Greeting at the top right.
Chances are that your greeting is set to Default just like the picture above. What you likely need to do is choose Custom and then click the word Record to record your own customized greeting. Once you do that everything should work you expect it to.
The other thing that I can offer up as a troubleshooting tip is to make sure that you have Live Voicemail set up as per this Apple Support document. The most common thing that I see is that a voicemail password hasn’t been set which can break Live Voicemail for whatever reason. My guess is that even though this feature is turned on by default, there are some prerequisites that need to be present for it to work.
What do you think of Live Voicemail? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts.
January 12, 2026 at 10:58 pm
Live voicemail is absolutely awful. Even worse is the arrogance of Apple to take over a perfectly functioning voicemail service with such a crap alternative without any notice. I had no idea what had happened to my already existing voicemail service – all of a sudden I was getting HOPELESSLY transcribed messages, which made it clear that someone had rung and left me a message, but accessing the message was near impossible. I’m my opinion it is terrible, and I am so pleased I found how to disable it.