Apple offers free call recording and transcription on iPhones; journalists rejoice

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The word you are looking for is “sherlocked”.

In November 2001, a Macintosh developer named Dan Wood released an application called Watson, intended to be a companion of sorts to Sherlock, a search tool that Apple was then shipping with Macs. (Get it – Sherlock and Watson?) Watson lets you perform a variety of common web searches – checking the weather or stock prices, finding recipes or digging through Amazon – without needing to open a web browser. It cost $29 and was very popular. Apple even awarded it one of its prestigious Apple Design Awards for “Most Innovative Mac OS X Application.”

Fast forward to July 2002, when Apple unveiled new updates to its operating system every year. Among them was a new version of Sherlock – which seemed to include all of Watson’s features. With a single announcement on stage, Apple had eliminated the market for Watson, Dan Wood’s livelihood. All kinds of outcry followed, but Apple didn’t pay much attention to it. Watson’s sales dried up and it wasn’t long before Wood sold his intellectual property and shut it down.

Watson was therefore the first application to be “herlocked”, that is to say “to make a unique functionality in third-party software obsolete by introducing a functionality similar or identical to the operating system or a proprietary program/application” .

Of course, Apple back then wasn’t the giant it is today. Apple’s 2002 version was worth about $4 billion and accounted for a measly 3 percent of the PC market; Apple 2024 is worth around $3 thousand billion and, depending on the day, the most valuable company in the world. So any sherlocking happens on a much larger scale.

At its Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features large and small, but one of them – a single sentence, dropped an hour and 36 minutes into the presentation – caught attention the attention of journalists and developers fearing being Sherlocked.

Recordings, transcriptions and summaries based on Apple Intelligence will also be available in the Phone app.

It’s true: You’ll soon be able to use your iPhone to record phone interviews. And after you hang up, your phone will transcribe those recordings for you. It’s a process that once took up a conservative 172% of journalists’ time and still requires third-party apps today, most of which require a subscription.

Personally, I used TapeACall for the recording part, and it never failed me – but two months ago the new owners increased the price of their annual subscription from $19 to $79. For transcription, I used Otter ($100 per year for more than occasional use) and MacWhisper (free for basic use, $30 one-time purchase for higher quality, but slower). But if Apple wants to do the work for free… they’re going to get Sherlocked.

Of course, Apple’s version may be subpar in several respects. It won’t be officially released until iOS 18 in September at the earliest, and since it uses Apple Intelligence, whose release date is a little fuzzier, it could be longer than that. (There is a beta version of iOS 18, but the call recording feature apparently isn’t in it.) Transcription, at least, will likely be limited to the newest, most powerful iPhones. Apple will also announce “this call is recorded” to both parties – which is a legal requirement in some states, but maybe an embarrassment to others. And a footnote on Apple’s site notes some linguistic and geographic limitations:

The transcript will be available in English (US, UK, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore), Spanish (US, Mexico, Spain), French (France), German (Germany) , Japanese (Japan), Mandarin. Chinese (Mainland China, Taiwan), Cantonese (Mainland China, Hong Kong) and Portuguese (Brazil).

However, this did not stop journalists from rejoicing at the news.

Illustrated generated via Midjourney.





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