How to Activate Call Screening on iOS 26
iOS 26 introduced a new AI feature called Call Screening. It’s a feature that’s been touted several times on “what is possible” with the AI assistant, and I am curious to find out whether or not Siri would be useful enough to actually answer the calls. As far as I am aware, similar features were not well received by the users.
In order to activate Call Screening, your iPhone system language and region settings must match one of the supported area. It may sound counterintuitive, but simply using American English is not enough to activate it in, say, South Korea, where I am right now. For a phone set to South Korean region, the system language must be in Korean. Likewise, if your phone is set to a region with unsupported language as the system language, the phone app will not show the option to activate Call Screening. From my experience, the system is not geofenced though; if you wish to keep it in American English, changing the region to United States is an option.
It does not help in my particular case though, where most of the cellular calls — for a Korean number with a Korean SIM card — I get are in Korean. I need Apple Intelligence to ask screening questions in Korean to weed out the spams; but I would prefer to keep my overall system in English. Apple needs to isolate Apple Intelligence’s language per apps and regions per apps, just like how iOS is handling languages.
The other issue I have with Apple Intelligence so far is its inability to handle multiple languages at the same time. I’m not suggesting Apple Intelligence should be able to jump back and forth multiple languages as I query the questions; however, I should be able to specify what language of an AI I would use for the specific case, like for the phone or for the text messages.