Siri will soon transcribe your voicemails and text them to you

Everyone knows voicemail is the pits. People tend to ramble in messages, perhaps because our voicemail leaving skills have gotten so rusty.

But still, sometimes your mom leaves you a voicemail, and what do you do then?

Enter Siri, who will soon act even more like the secretaries of yore by taking your call, writing down the message, and leaving it for you in a digital post-it.

Business Insider reported on Monday that Apple employees are testing out the new feature, which goes a step beyond Siri’s current transcription capabilities. Business Insider explains:

When someone using iCloud Voicemail is unable to take a call, Siri will answer instead of letting the call go to a standard digital audio recorder. iCloud Voicemail can relay information about where you are and why you can’t pick up the phone to certain people. But the coolest feature of the service is that Siri will transcribe any incoming voicemails, just as it does with anything else you say to it.

Per BI, we’ll likely starting receiving texted voice mails from Siri sometime next year.

Voice-to-text transcribing services are not new. Google Voice — Google’s phone and voicemail service — already has a transcription option. Google describes the service like this:

If you use Google Voice’s voicemail transcription service, Google may transcribe voicemail messages into text and email and/or SMS the resulting text to the email account or phone number(s) designated in your user settings.

It remains to be seen whether Siri will do a better job of transcribing messages than her predecessors.