Receiving calls from friends and family is great, but sometimes you need some time to yourself. Or maybe you’re just suspicious of an unknown number calling you. Either way, during those times, you need to send callers straight to voicemail. If you don’t have voicemail set up on your iPhone, it’s pretty easy to do.

It's important to note that voicemail is a feature of your carrier. If for some reason you can't set up voicemail on your iPhone, you may need to contact your carrier.

A handy feature of iPhones is Visual Voicemail: most carriers support the feature, but some may not or require a specific plan. Visual Voicemail simply means that you can view your voicemail messages in a list on your iPhone, instead of having to call your carrier’s voicemail service and enter your voicemail password. You can play/pause and even rewind messages in Visual Voicemail.

A new feature in iOS 17 called Live Voicemail lets you automatically see a real-time transcription while someone is leaving you a message. It’s a bit similar to the Call Screen feature available on Google Pixel phones. Live Voicemail doesn’t require a carrier to support the feature, and it works on all iPhones that can run iOS 17, including the iPhone XR and up to the iPhone 15 series. To enable Live Voicemail, go to Settings and look for the Phone setting. You should then see an option for Live Voicemail, tap the toggle to turn it on. If the switch is green, Live Voicemail is enabled.