Put the robots to work for us against the bad robots, I say. It worked in Terminator 2. Why can’t it work for those blisteringly annoying spam calls that, as of the past few years, have seemed to outnumber the calls I get from people I want to hear from?
Apple launched iOS 26 for iPhones last month, and alongside a major aesthetic overhaul, it comes with one major addition: an automated spam call filter to fight automated spam calls.
I haven’t been this psyched to see two robots square off since I last played Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots.
How does it work?
When I updated my iPhone to iOS 26, the new feature wasn’t enabled by default. To turn it on, go into Settings, then Apps, and then click Phone. Down toward the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a section titled Screen Unknown Callers.
Yours is probably set to “Never,” which is allowing all these spam calls to ring your phone. Click “Ask Reason for Calling” to turn on the automated spam filter.
When a person calls from a number that isn’t in your account’s contacts list, your iPhone will no longer ring right away. Instead, Siri will ask the caller what they’re calling about.
Their answer will be transcribed in real-time and shown to you as a message while the caller is holding on the line. You can type a follow-up question for Siri to then ask the caller if you want more information, or you can choose to answer or reject the call.
It’s not perfect. If it were perfect, it’d find a way to permanently disconnect the spam callers’ phone service and exile them to an island where the most advanced form of communication would be letters, and they’d have to write in cursive.
But it feels satisfying that at last we can give the spam callers a taste of their own medicine.
The post The iPhone’s New Automatic Spam Call Blocker Is Actually Pretty Sweet appeared first on VICE.
