Apple Will Finally Add Call Recording to Its Phone App
Apple showed off a lot of new and exciting features in iOS 18 at WWDC this week, including showing how its higher-end devices will use artificial intelligence . In fact, I’ve been wanting to bring one of Apple’s most interesting AI features to iOS for a long time: call recording.
Before iOS 18 and Apple Intelligence —what Apple calls its artificial intelligence—you had to rely on third-party apps like Recordator and TapeACall to record phone calls on your iPhone . This typically required some additional steps, and often required a subscription to take full advantage of each app’s various features. However, with the advent of iOS 18 and Apple Intelligence, this is about to change.
This fall, iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max subscribers will have access to built-in real-time call recording in the Phone app. This feature will be available as a button in the call menu, and everyone on the line will be notified of the recording as soon as it starts.
This feature will not only record your call, but will also automatically create a transcript of the conversation after it ends, giving you two ways to continue the discussion. Everything is also stored directly on your device, so you don’t have to worry about paying for additional apps or going through extra security loops.
The downside here is that due to the AI integration required for the transcription feature to work, it will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro, Pro Max and any future AI-compatible iPhone models, so users of the regular iPhone 15 (or older devices) will not will have access to these new features.
At launch, Apple says transcriptions will only support English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Cantonese and Portuguese. However, it is possible that other languages will appear in the future. The first beta of iOS 18 is currently available for testing, but it doesn’t include any of the new AI-powered features expected to arrive this fall. You’ll have to wait until late summer to try out these features, including new recording and real-time conversation transcription.