When Apple releases iOS 18 in the coming days—most likely on Monday, September 16—it will bring with it a brilliant new recording and transcription feature. It will work in Voice Memos and Notes apps and will even record phone calls. It won’t all be available from day one, but here’s what’s coming.
Voice Memos
As a reporter, I do a lot of interviews. Transcribing them is one of the dullest, most time-consuming drudges. It’s the same for students transcribing lectures, businesspeople taking minutes of meetings and so on.
I’ve found great solutions over the years, including the Recorder app that’s exclusive to Google Pixel phones and the cool, credit card-sized Plaud Note recorder. Both record and transcribe effectively. The Plaud even records phone calls when you snap the recorder to the back of an iPhone.
With iOS 18, you open a Voice Memo and start recording as normal. Swipe up so the recording fills the screen. Tap the icon at the bottom left which has speech marks in a rectangular balloon and the words appear onscreen immediately. Available in iOS 18.
Notes
This is probably the app I use more than any other, and that’s not going to change now you can also record audio here.
Open a new note and tap the paperclip icon (no, I wouldn’t have guessed to look there, either, it took me a while to find it). There’s an option called Record Audio. Tap this and the speech marks box is visible on the bottom left. It saves the audio with the transcription just below. Available in iOS 18.
Recording Phone Calls
While the above options are available across all iPhones capable of running iOS 18 (which is the same list as those which run iOS 17), the capability to record and transcribe phone calls is part of Apple Intelligence. This means the only iPhones which will be able to do it when Apple Intelligence launches with iOS 18.1 (likely in October) will be the iPhone 16 series, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
To use it, you launch a call as usual and then tap on the record button in the top left corner of the screen. A spoken message tells all parties that the call is being recorded. It’s saved in the Notes app with the transcript.
There’s lots more coming to iOS 18, but this is a key upgrade for me.
