Changes coming to your iPhone this fall via iOS 17

In iOS 17, users will be able to choose how their contact cards are displayed, including what pops up when they call another iPhone. They can update their image, whether it’s a photo or Memoji, and its filters and the color and font of their name.

If voicemail isn’t your thing, Apple has some good news. Phone voicemails will be transcribed in real time, so users don’t need to listen to get messages. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said during the livestream that since it’s real-time, if something important happens, you can “take the call and talk to them on the spot.”

Another big change is that voicemail is also coming to FaceTime, so users can leave video recordings for friends and family.

If you’re a notorious group chat freak, iOS 17 has a big feature for you. It’s the “catch-up” arrow in the upper-right corner of the message window that lets you jump to the most recently read message, even from the last week. You can now go beyond ordinary emoji and use your own photos to create reactions, including animated stickers from Live Photos. Users can also react via stickers in third-party apps, Apple announced.

The company also said that dictation and autocorrect will now use Transformer-based language models for speech recognition and prediction to improve accuracy and efficiency. Apple says it’s now easier to revert to the original text if something goes wrong with the feature, and online predictions will be more personalized: Just use the space bar to accept a suggestion.

For those who like to overshare voice messages, iOS 17 offers automatic transcription.

Messaging now offers in-app location sharing, so you can see your contacts’ shared locations without clicking out of a conversation, and check-ins, so you can see when someone arrives home safely. If you didn’t make it to your location, your iPhone notifies you to check in and lets you add a time to your planned arrival time. If you don’t respond, it can share your location and battery status with contacts of your choice. All of this information is end-to-end encrypted, Apple said.

The company also revealed updates to Airdrop, including “Namedrop.” The feature allows you to hold your device close to another person’s iPhone or Apple Watch and share contact information, specifying the phone number or email address you want to pass on.

If you’re keen to show off all those vacation photos, iOS 17 will let you keep sharing them even when you’re out of Airdrop range, without losing quality.

Notes application power users now have a new tool. Journal uses on-device machine learning to “inspire your writing” with personalized suggestions from your Photos app. Say you’re on a week-long beach vacation with your family: Journal might show you the places you’ve been, your favorite songs and photos you’ve taken along the way, along with writing prompts for you to reflect on the highlights.

Users can schedule diary reminders for specific times of day, and the app’s content is encrypted so “no one but you can access it, not even Apple,” senior engineering manager Adeeti Ullal said at the event .