Hi Glenn, Brenda, Chris, and Others, Visual voicemail is a feature that is offered by certain cell phone carriers. The voicemail messages are downloaded to your iPhone and stored locally on the device. You access a list of names or telephone numbers (if there's no corresponding identification matching caller with number in your contacts) and dates, and you can play any of your selections back.
To answer Brenda and Chris's question, there are a few different Mac programs that will let you access the visual voicemail. If Chris picked up his copy of Toast Titanium 11.0.4 as part of the Fall MacUpdate bundle in 2011, he might have a license to PhoneView, which is one of the apps that can access visual voicemail data from either iPhone backups or from the directly connected device. iExplorer is supposed to work on both Windows and the Mac. However, someone on the viphone list tried to use iExplorer and claimed it was not accessible with either JAWS or NVDA. It's possible that the Mac version of iExplorer is accessible. PhoneView is a Mac-only product that is accessible with VoiceOver. To save visual voicemails from your connected device, in the table of items, interact, then select "Voicemail". VO-J or tab to the table of voicemails and select the items you want to copy. Stop interacting with the table of voicemails and use Control+F5 to move to the title bar, navigate to "Copy to iTunes" button and VO-Space to send these to iTunes. They'll appear with the date and time in the track name (e.g. "11-7-12 1100 AM Voicemail from <name of sender>") as 128 kbps AAC audio files with no artist or album name. (Find them either by looking for a playlist named "Voicemails" or go to your "Recently Added" smart playlist.) If you want them in some other format, use iTunes to convert to mp3, etc. I did find 3 unlabeled buttons with the PhoneView app, when you select entries under categories like "Voicemails", "Music", "Podcasts", "Ringtones", or "Voice Memos". These are the buttons at the end of the window for "previous track", "play/pause", and "next track" if you review the audio tracks listed in the tables. Everything else seems to be accessible with VoiceOver. You can even access your call logs. PhoneView can transfer files between your computer and your iOS device, or access files from your iOS backup files (if your iPhone is not attached to the computer). PhoneView is an app by Ecamm Network that costs $29.95. If you only want to retrieve files from your last iTunes backup of your device, you might be able to use a donationware app named iScavenge: http://www.iscavenge.info/ I don't know whether this app is accessible with VoiceOver. It lists that you can retrieve Contacts, Messages, Notes, and Photos from the iTunes backp. It might be possible to retrieve visual voicemails. You can read Christopher Breen's Macworld article, "How to extract voice and text messages from an iPhone" (October 8, 2012) for more details about PhoneView. (Use Command-Shift-R to read this in Safari reader.) http://www.macworld.com/article/2011174/how-to-extract-voice-and-text-messages-from-an-iphone.html There's a free trial download for this app: http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/ Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica did a review of four different apps that can transfer voicemail, about the same time as Chris Breen's Macworld article. "Hands-on: Four Mac apps to transfer voicemail, other files from your iPhone" (October 11, 2012). She reviewed PhoneView, iExplorer, Touchcopy, and iBackupBot. (PhoneView is her top pick, but iBackupBot is the budget contender at $19.95.) The shortened link to the URL is: http://ars.to/RdBoxd Again, read this in Safari reader with Command-Shift-R. The article mentions that all four products offer free trial demos (with limited functionality), so you can try this out for yourself. I haven't tried any of the trial demos. Just by way of explanation, a few times a year, certain apps may be be offered for sale as part of a discounted "bundle". The MacUpdate Promo site generally offers such a bundle about 3 times a year. There are other such sites that occasionally run promotions like this. You might be mainly interested in one or two apps. The offerings can vary a lot from year to year. Typically, they'll offer 9 or 10 apps for a bundle price of around $49.95. I post any interesting deals I come across. A number of list members (including me) picked up Nisus Writer Pro when it was offered as part of the Maclegion bundle in 2011. (This was the year they released their first major version revision in several years -- I don't expect this to happen frequently.) Often, the total bundle price can be less than the price of the one or two apps you are most interested in. Anyway, I had a license to PhoneView from a previous bundle purchase, so I decided to install it after this discussion came up . It seems to work pretty well. You can also use it to extract files, documents, or recordings that you've created within iPhone apps. It's probably not something that I would separately purchase, though it does a very good job of giving you direct access to files on your iOS devices. Certainly, if you want to save your visual voicemails, this is a pretty simple way to do so. HTH. Cheers, Esther On May 23, 2013, at 3:26 PM, Glenn wrote: > I don't even know what a visual voice mail is. > Glenn > ----- Original Message ----- > From: <[email protected]> > To: "Mac OSX & iOS Accessibility" <[email protected]> > Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 12:09 PM > Subject: Re: can we save visual voice mails > > > It does help, but I am wondering if there is a program that wi let me put > the messages on a windows XP computer? > > Thanks, > > Brenda > > malto:[email protected] > > Sent from my iPhone > > On May 19, 2013, at 10:25 PM, Sarah k Alawami <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Yeah. it saves it in I can't remember what format. I'll have to go back >> and look, but it is the persons's voice. >> >> Take care and hope that helps. >> On May 19, 2013, at 8:16 PM, [email protected] wrote: >> >>> Oh, now, that is interesting. But we can't actually save the voice mail >>> itself in the person's voice? >>> >>> Thanks, >>> >>> Brenda >>> >>> mailto:[email protected] >>> ----- Original Message ----- >>> From: "Sarah k Alawami" <[email protected]> >>> To: "Mac OSX & iOS Accessibility" <[email protected]> >>> Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2013 7:41 PM >>> Subject: Re: can we save visual voice mails >>> >>> >>> If you have IBackupBot yes you can. Basically that extracts the voice >>> mails >>> and everything else and makes it human readable. I used this to get the >>> number of a dentist once. lol! >>> >>> Take care.. >>> On May 19, 2013, at 5:05 PM, Chris Gilland <[email protected]> >>> wrote: >>> >>>> Shalom Brenda. >>>> >>>> I don't believe you can, no. At least not that I am aware of. >>>> >>>> Chris. >>>> >>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: <[email protected]> >>>> To: "Mac OSX & iOS Accessibility" <[email protected]> >>>> Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2013 7:52 PM >>>> Subject: can we save visual voice mails >>>> >>>> >>>>> I'm wondering if we can save visual voice mails? I know we can, on the <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. 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