If you are using iOS 10 and have not yet encountered automatic voicemail transcription, take a minute and open the Phone app and tap the Voicemail tab.

Tap on a voicemail and you’ll notice that, in addition to the playback controls, there’s now a textual transcription of each message. Though the quality of the transcription can be spotty, it’s usually good enough to get a basic sense of the message.

The service is a beta, which gives me the sense that we’ll see needed improvements to transcription accuracy over time.

Lory Gil pulled together this nice how-to on various aspects of working with iOS 10’s voicemail transcription.