For something that won’t be released in its full form until the fall, iOS 18 is certainly generating a lot of interest and speculation. The likely arrival of AI-powered features will make this a software update.
A lot of talk about iOS 18 ahead of its release focuses on how Apple might integrate AI into its iPhone software. Will this mean automatically generated playlists in Apple Music? Generative authoring tools in apps like Pages and Keynote? Maybe even a smarter, more conversational Siri that’s better equipped to ask more complex questions
That’s fine with me. But whatever Apple added in iOS 18, in terms of artificial intelligence, I hope the Voice Memos app gets some love and attention as well.
Yes, you read that right. I think Voice Memos is crying out for more advanced capabilities. And if Apple adds them in iOS 18, the voice recorder app has the potential to be one of the most important built-in tools on your iPhone.
Voice recorder status
Currently, voice recordings on iOS are… fine. If I need to record a voice for a video, I activate the application. And I think Apple has equipped the app with some handy editing tools that make it easy to crop footage on the iPhone’s relatively limited screen space.
But compare it to similar apps on the Pixel and Galaxy S phones — Recorder on the Pixel, Voice Recorder on Samsung phones — and you see how voice recordings can do so much more. You can transcribe your recordings to Pixel and Samsung phones, and the Pixel even transcribes on the fly. Both applications recognize and mark when different speakers appear in recordings. And since the Galaxy S24, Samsung’s voice recorder can use AI to summarize what’s on the recording. (That feature was extended to last year’s flagship Samsung phones via the recent One UI 6.1 update.)
When I need to record an interview or a presentation, I don’t grab my iPhone — it’s whatever Pixel I happen to have on hand. (In my head-to-head testing of Recorder vs. Voice Recorder, I found the Pixel’s transcripts to be easier to clean up, and I like how the recordings are automatically titled.) The iPhone’s Voice Memos is a good recording app if all I need is the basics, but for anything beyond that , the built-in recording apps on the best Android phones put Apple’s efforts to shame.
How AI Can Help Voiceovers
At a minimum, Apple needs to add the ability to transcribe voice tracks. Yes, plenty of third-party apps offer this functionality, but it seems like something that should be built right into Apple’s own offering. What’s more, the transcription should be entirely on-device, something you’d expect a newer-age iPhone to have enough processing power to handle. (And if not, well, it’s certainly something the upcoming iPhone 16 models and their A18 chipsets should be able to support.)
By the way, it’s not just a matter of converting audio to text. The transcript must be linked to the recording, so that if you tap on a specific word or sentence, you jump to that location in the audio. These are table stakes for the transcription feature.
I think Voice Memos should be able to recognize different speakers and mark them as such in the transcript. Again, this is something you’ll find on recent Pixels and Samsung phones, though Apple has a chance to beat the competition, as my testing found that the recorder and voice recorder can get confused if there’s a lot of cross-talk or fast-forwarding in recorded conversations . Outdoing rival recording apps on accurate speaker identification would give the iOS 18 version of Voice Memos a real edge.
I’m less interested in summaries as an important addition to AI-powered voiceovers. Yes, it’s nice to have, especially if you’re recording brainstorming sessions, lectures, or anything else where you need a quick overview of what was said. But I don’t think it’s a must-have plugin.
Instead, what I really want Voice Memos to do is automatically assign a title based on the recording’s content. Currently, Apple’s app uses the location of your recording as the title, and it’s up to you to go in and change that. Take a lot of shots in the same place and it’s very hard to tell which shot covers which subject. Taking the responsibility of changing the title out of the user’s hands and automating it would really save time.
Layout for iOS 18
Obviously, voice recordings aren’t Apple’s primary focus with iOS 18. Boosting AI with this update will largely be Apple’s attempt to make up for lost time as it looks to catch up with the efforts of other companies that have been faster adopters of the technology.
But if the purpose of the OS is to update it to add new features and improvements that will make old apps feel like new, Voice Memos is crying out for some improvements. And artificial intelligence could provide a lot of useful functions to that particular application.