What are some "no brainer" inventions or features that just haven't made it to the consumer yet?

TehBamski@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 191 points –
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A better voicemail.

I just re-watched the introduction of the first iPhone, and one thing that stood out to me was this "visual voicemail" thing they showed. To this day I still just get an SMS if someone leaves a message, and then have to call my voicemail and listen to recordings one by one. That's still the norm for standard phone contracts here afaik, it's ridiculous!

I didn’t know that was even still a thing. For years now on my iPhone I’ve just looked at the text transcriptions of my voicemail in my phone app.

This has been a standard android feature on the phones I've owned for the last... I wanna say 10 years.

I'm sure it could be comfortable in an English speaking country.

Now my iPhone, actually transcribes my voicemail live and gives me the opportunity to pick up during them leaving the voicemail. Like old-school answering machines used to do.

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That's odd, Android transcribes my messages by default

Seems to heavily depend on your provider. Some work with the standard phone apps, some have their own apps, but most don't seem to offer it at all here in Germany. One even sends you an audio MMS instead and just calls that "Visual Mailbox". It's crazy to me that such a basic and useful feature still isn't just a standard thing on all phones.

My husband and I have the same provider but different brands of phone. I have visual voicemail, he doesn't and my phone is the older one. It seems like Samsung and Apple are the only ones to even offer the app so far.

It depends on your service provider. In Canada they charge for it. Last time I checked it was around $7/month.

How do you make it do that mine's not doing that. And I'm on the latest version of Android.

Using the Google phone app, one of the tabs is voicemail and it automatically converts it to text.

Mine also allows you to see each voicemail in your acct inbox and play/delete/call back each one like a song on a media player.

There's still the cell providers limit on how many voicemails are allowed though. Better to use Google voice and have unlimited voice mail

I've had my google voice account handle voicemails for like 15 years and it did that for me. Well, now I don't have to, but it's been great.

I generally love T-Mobile, but it's obnoxious that they charge an extra monthly fee if you want visual voicemail.

I have a Samsung S20 and it has visual voicemail, haven't dialed my voicemail in years. I assumed most phones from the past couple years had it, but my husband's Google pixel doesn't,.

I agree, this needs to be a standard.

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