Has visual voicemail on your iPhone 12 Pro suddenly vanished! Can’t see a list of your voicemail messages, read a voicemail-to-text transcript, or listen to an individual voicemail directly from your iPhone 12 Pro after updating your iOS? Or is your visual voicemail not working on iPhone 12 Pro for no apparent reason?
If so, you are not alone! For most of us, being able to routinely check voicemail is critical, especially for on those important missed phone calls!
See also: Voicemail not working on iPhone 12 Pro? Fix
It can be pretty annoying to find that your visual voicemail is not working on iPhone 12 Pro after an iOS update or for simply no reason at all. And if you need it for work and family, having to keep calling your voicemail to retrieve messages is not a great option!
Here are some troubleshooting tips that you may try to fix visual voicemail issues on your iPhone 12 Pro.
Note: information in this article apply to iPhone 12, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max.
What’s Visual Voicemail?
Visual Voicemail shows you a list of all your voicemail messages left by your callers–so you can choose which ones to listen to now, listen to later, share with others, or delete. And depending on your location, you may be able to read transcripts of your voicemail messages with iOS’ voicemail-to-text feature.
You can even save your Visual Voicemail messages as notes or voice memos, or share them with apps like Messages, Mail, or Airdrop.
Visual Voicemail includes voice-to-text voicemail transcription visual voicemail on iPhone
Depending on your language and region, Visual voicemail may also include that love it or hate it feature voicemail transcription, available to folks using iPhone 6 models and later.
Voicemail transcripts take your voicemail’s audio file and using Apple Servers and machine learning, transcribes those audio files into on-screen text. So you can read your voicemail, without needing to play it or listen to it!
Please note that you can use the visual voicemail feature if your carrier supports this, in the USA, most carriers, if not all, support this.
Have someone call you, can he or she leave a voicemail message? If not, make sure that you set up your voicemail (Phone > Voicemail). Another problem is that the inbox of your voicemails may be full, and sometimes seem full. You may need to delete some voicemails.
Greeting
On your iPhone, start the Phone app, tap the Voicemail tab and tap Greeting. What settings you have there? If it is Default, change it to Custom and it is Custom, change it to Default.
Restart the Phone app
You may be having this issue because the Phone app may not be working as expected. You may try restarting to the phone app to see if this helps. Here’s how:
- go to your Home screen, swipe up from the bottom of the screen. This will bring up the app switcher. Swipe left or right until you find the Phone app preview and swipe up on the preview. This will close the Phone app.
- Now reopen the Phone app and test to see if you can see your voicemails.
Reset your password
Try resetting your voicemail password. On your iPhone, you can do this easily. Here is how:
- Go to Settings > Phone and tap Change Voicemail Password.
- Type in a new password.
- Tap Done. You will be asked to reenter the new password. Enter again and then tap Done.
Update your iPhone
Make sure that your iPhone is running the latest version of iOS. You can update your iPhone wirelessly by heading to Settings > General > Software Update.
You can also turn on automatic updates by turning on Automatic Updates: Go to Settings > General > Software Update > Automatic Updates.
Toggle Airplane Mode
On your iPhone, turn on Airplane Mode, wait for about a minute and turn it off. Airplane Mode will disable all of your device’s wireless functions. Turning on and off may fix your visual voicemail issues. If this does not work, also try this in the following order:
- Turn on Airplane Mode.
- Restart your iPhone (see the next section about how you can restart your phone).
- Then when your phone is on, turn off Airplane Mode now.
Restart
Restart your iPhone. Here is how you can restart your iPhone:
Press and hold the side (on the side of your iPhone) and the volume down or up buttons together until you see the power off slider. Drag the slider. Wait for about a minute and then press and hold the side button until the Apple logo appears.
Cellular connection
Make sure that your iPhone is connected to a cellular network. See this article, if you see a No Service error. Visual VoiceMails require a strong cellular connection to work effectively. You can check this easily. Turn off Wi-Fi on your iPhone (Settings > Wi-Fi) and call someone. If the call works, your cellular connection is working.
You may also try the following tips:
- Go to Settings > Cellular > and turn off Cellular Data. Wait for one minute. And then turn it on.
- Enject your SIM card, and place it again. You need to open the SIM tray. To do that insert a paper clip into the tray hole. Gently pus the paper clip toward the phone. This will open the SIM tray. Remove SIM
- See this article, if you see a No SIM card Installed message.
- Contact your carrier. Maybe there are outages in your area that your carrier is experiencing.
Carrier settings
Check for a Carrier Settings update
To manually check for and install a carrier settings update:
- Make sure that your device is connected to a Wi-Fi or cellular network.
- Tap Settings > General > About. If an update is available, you’ll see an option to update your carrier settings.
Carrier updates include updates from your carrier to add new features or enhance the performance.
Voicemail transcripts not working
If voicemail transcripts are not working on iPhone 12 Pro, or if you are getting an error message like “Transcription not Available”. Siri may be the cause. Follow the steps below:
- Go to Settings > Siri & Search.
- Tap to turn off Listen for “Hey Siri”.
- Also, turn off Press Side Button for Siri.
- Restart your iPhone.
- And now turn on these Siri settings by Settings > Siri & Search.
You may also want to troubleshoot if Siri is not working.
Reset network settings
On your iPhone, reset your Network Settings. Go to Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Reset > Reset Network Settings. Please note that your network-related settings will be erased like your Wi-Fi passwords etc.
Call voicemail directly
You can also check your voicemail messages by calling voicemail. Here is how you can do that on your iPhone:
- Start the Phone app.
- Tap Keypad.
- Press and hold on the 1. This will call voicemail. Here is where you can check voicemails.
Visual voicemail not working on iPhone 12 Pro: Fixed
We hope that one of the above steps fixed visual voicemail not working on iPhone 12 Pro issue. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments below.
Tried every example given on how to fix visual voicemail. even took it to a t-mobile store. none worked. store said to see about getting a new phone because i have some kind of glitch. worked up until 9/29/21.
The only thing that worked for me was to call the wireless provider and ask to enable visual voicemail. Took me two support calls before finding a knowledgeable associate that was able to fix the issue. I tried every step in this article and none worked.
Here’s what fixed mine with the help of Apple Support. Go into your message app and act as you’re going to text message someone. At the bottom of the keyboard, press the microphone icon. You will get a popup about using dictation for the first time. You need to accept this. Test by speaking and make sure your text is transcribed. Now, reboot your phone and wait a little while. Apple says this could take up tp 24 hours, but mine took only 5 minutes.
In case anyone is having this issue, here is the one fix I found to work:
Go to Settings > Siri & Search.
Scroll down to the Ask Siri section.
Tap Language and set it to English (United States).
Tap Siri Voice and set it to American.
I had mine set up to use a British voice (I love a good British accent!!) and visual voicemail wasn’t working. Changing Siri to American language with one of the American voices worked right out of the box.