How to Use Visual Voicemail on Android

Visual voicemail is a feature on Android phones that shows you a list of your voicemail messages — similar to how your email inbox works — and lets you read a text version of each message without having to listen to it. You can also tap to play just the messages that matter to you, in any order, rather than listening through every message from first to last.

Before visual voicemail, you had to call a voicemail number, enter a PIN, and listen to messages in sequence. If you had five messages and the important one was the last one, you had to sit through all four others first.

With visual voicemail, your messages appear as a list with the caller's name (if it is in your contacts), the phone number, the date and time of the message, and a short transcription (text version) of what was said. You can scan the list in seconds and go straight to the message you care about.

Most major US carriers — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and others — support visual voicemail for Android. Whether it works on your specific phone depends on your carrier and your plan. Some carriers charge a small extra fee for visual voicemail, though most include it for free.

On many Android phones, visual voicemail is built into the Phone app and activates automatically. On others, your carrier provides a separate app. The Google Phone app (pre-installed on Google Pixel phones and available for download on other Android phones) has excellent built-in visual voicemail with transcription.

Transcriptions are done automatically by your phone and are usually accurate enough to understand the gist of a message, though names, phone numbers, and accents can sometimes cause errors.