Activate the caller's name feature on the phone (Android and iPhone)

 Smartphone operating systems, be it Android or iOS, allow you to set a different ringtone for specific contacts, which is a useful feature if you receive a lot of phone calls and need to distinguish those from certain people, especially when your phone is in your pocket or not within reach and you need Quickly to know if the phone call is important or not. But that's not the only way you can know who's calling without looking at the screen, another feature makes the phone say the names of the callers out loud so that just by hearing the name you know if the call needs your attention or you can ignore it at the moment. This feature is turned off by default, so let's go through how to enable it.

Activate the caller's name feature on the phone (Android and iPhone)

Activate caller name reading on Android

In fact, the caller name reading feature is part of the Phone app that is responsible for managing outgoing and incoming calls, so you don't need to install any additional apps; But keep in mind that the presence of this feature is not confirmed in all Android phones, which often comes with a special call management application from the manufacturer such as OnePlus Phone, Samsung Phone, and so on. Thus, the presence of the caller name reading feature depends on the support of the call management application, if available. The way to activate it will also be different due to the variety of user interfaces from one phone to another.

Activate the caller's name feature on the phone (Android and iPhone)

In Samsung phones, for example, there is support for this feature, and it can be activated by opening the “Phone” application, then clicking on the menu button ( ⁝ ) at the top and selecting “Settings.” On the screen that appears, press “Answering and ending calls” and then Click on Read caller names aloud to be able to activate the feature and choose either to say the name of the caller “Always” or when wearing the “Over Bluetooth and headphones only” headset.

From now on, whenever you receive a call on your phone you will be able to hear the name of the caller before the ringtone starts, and if the name is not registered as a contact, the phone number of the caller will be spoken. This is for Samsung phones, but in other Android phones from Xiaomi, Oppo, Nokia and others, there is a Google application for managing calls “Phone by Google” as a default application, which already supports the caller’s name feature, and we explained before how to activate it easily.

But note that if you just activate the caller's name feature as described in the previous paragraph, the contacts' names may not be spoken if they are in Arabic, because this feature depends on the "text-to-speech" engine supported in your phone which may not recognize by default the Arabic alphabet.

So if you notice this problem after activating the feature, it can be solved easily by activating the Google Voice Services engine that supports the Arabic language. Again, the steps differ from one Android phone to another, so look in the phone's settings, specifically the Input settings and you will inevitably find an option that allows you to modify the text-to-speech engine.

On Samsung phones, for example, there is a special Samsung engine that defaults to text-to-speech which does not support Arabic. So, this can be modified by opening Settings, then heading to the General management section, and then clicking on Text-to-speech output.

Now to change the default engine, press "Preferred engine" and select "Google Voice Services" or Google Text-to-speech Engine. Then go back a step back and press "Language" and select "Use system language" from The menu if the phone's language is Arabic or "Arabic" if the phone's language is English. In this way, the phone will be able to read the names of the callers, whether they are in English or Arabic.

Activate the feature to pronounce the caller's name on the iPhone

Activate the caller's name feature on the phone (Android and iPhone)

The feature to speak the name of the caller has been in iPhone phones since 2016, when it was first introduced with the iOS 10 update, and it is still present in the latest versions. The feature is based on the same principle, speaking the names of your contacts so you don't have to look at the phone's screen, or take it out of your pocket to see who's calling.

The feature can be activated simply by opening the “Settings” application, scrolling down, then pressing “Phone” and then heading to the “Announce Calls” section. You can select “Always” or “Headphones Only” or When the phone is connected to the car via Bluetooth.

That's it, whenever you get a phone call the name of the caller will be announced out loud with the ringtone. But as with Android phones, you may encounter the problem of not speaking Arabic names because the call announcement feature depends on the Siri engine to convert text to speech, and therefore the language of the digital assistant “Siri” must be changed to Arabic. To do this, open Settings, then Siri & Search, and after pressing Language, select Arabic and confirm that you want to change the language. In this way, the name of the caller is pronounced even if it is in Arabic.