Can I Save Voicemails to My Computer?

It’s hard to determine how much storage you need on your smartphone. You might think the 16GB iPhone will do just fine, especially since it costs $100 more to get 32GB. But then all those photos and voicemails and apps start piling up on your phone and slowing things down. It’s even tougher to figure out what, exactly, you should eliminate on your phone to save space.

It’s one thing to decide you’re not going to use that restaurant’s app after all. But if you have some voicemails you want to keep, you might be at a loss for where to put them. In this case, your best option is figuring out how to save voicemails to your computer. Here’s what you need to know.

Why you might save voicemails

Some people decide to save voicemails to their computer for sentimental reasons. Maybe you got a job offer via voicemail that changed your life, and listening to it perks you up on days when work feels especially rough. It’s also possible to save a voicemail for business-related purposes.

For instance, it’s common for businesses to use ringless voicemail drops to contact potential customers. Your phone won’t ring, but you will notice a voicemail later. If you listen to the voicemail but aren’t sure about acting on it, storing it on your computer can give you the option of going back to it later. 

You may also want to preserve a voicemail for other reasons. If you just lost a loved one, you’ll probably find comfort in listening to their voicemail; it’s a common response to grief. But while voicemails can be comforting, losing those voicemails unexpectedly can be devastating. Your treasured voicemail could be deleted by your phone company to keep you within storage limits, for instance.

You need a more reliable storage place than your phone. Your computer is a better option if you want to make sure nothing is going to happen to that message. You can even store it on the cloud for extra security. Instead of having to hunt for your voicemail and hope it hasn’t been deleted overnight, you can trust that the message (or messages) will always be there waiting when you boot up your computer.

How to save voicemails to your computer

You’ve got reasons for saving voicemails to your computer, whether personal or business-related. Now you have to figure out how to make the transfer.

A lot of that depends on the type of smartphone you have. The iPhone X was the biggest-selling smartphone in the world in the first quarter of 2018. In fact, iPhones took up three of the top five spots, so let’s talk about transferring voicemails via iPhone.

You might think it’s a complicated process, but the New York Times reported on this topic in 2017 and found out that it’s actually pretty simple if you have at least iOS 9 and the Visual Voicemail feature enabled. If you’ve got both those things, you simply need to go to the voicemail tab and click on the message you want to save.

This file should have a share icon. When you click on that, you should get a few options for sharing it. If you have cloud access synced up on both your phone and computer, then saving that voicemail to the cloud will automatically mean you can access it on your laptop. 

And what if you want the file to exist physically on your computer’s hard drive? The easiest way to make that happen is to have both an iPhone and a Mac computer, since that means you can use AirDrop to transfer the voicemail over in seconds. Without that, you’ll need to get an auxiliary cord and physically connect your phone and computer.

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