iOS 9 Beta: Sharing and Saving Voicemails

OK, as silly as it sounds, this may just be my favorite feature of iOS 9. Have you ever wanted to save or share a voicemail you’ve received, maybe from a relative who has passed away? Or perhaps you need a coworker to follow up with a client who left you a message? Well, now you can send voicemails to other people or save them to different places around your iPhone. This is going to come in so handy! Can you tell I’m pretty excited?

So to do this, just open your phone app, touch the “Voicemail” tab at the bottom, and then select the message in question. When you do so, you’ll see the familiar “Share” arrow appear.

iOS 9's Voice Mail sharing optionTouch that, and you’ll get choices for what to do with that voicemail.

You can share Voice Mails via AirDrop, SMS, email, and more

So obviously you can share the voicemail with someone else through Messages or Mail (neat!), and your recipient will receive an audio file to listen to. 

Messages are sent as M4A audio filesYou can also add it to Notes, which is useful if you need to remind yourself to take action on a voicemail you’ve gotten. The other option shown above—Music—doesn’t yet function properly on my iPhone, but it would be pretty cool to be able to add a voicemail to my iTunes library. Get right on fixing that, Apple.

Anyhow, if you swipe from right to left across your sharing options, one of the other possibilities is sending the message to the built-in Voice Memos app. Doing so will save that voicemail out for easy playback whenever you want.

You can send messages to the Voice Memos app, tooI…I…I’m at a loss for words. I can’t tell you guys the number of times I’ve needed my business partner to return phone calls for me, only to have to spend time texting him all of the details. And I’ve worked with tons of folks who have held on to voicemails that contained important memories, so now they’ll have a simple way to save those. It’s like a whole new world! Well, a whole new world of voicemails, anyway.