Mobile phones have many different features that owners may not be aware of. One of them is TTY on an iPhone. What is it and how to use it? More on this below.
What does TTY mean in an iPhone?
TTY is a teletype feature that was originally designed to simplify communication for people with hearing and speech disabilities. It was created for them, but practice shows that few people use it. The reason is not only the lack of practical benefit, just few people know that this is TTY on an iPhone.
Initially, when the teletype was developed (starting from the 1870s), it was a huge device that transformed an electronic signal into text. Its modern and close counterpart is fax. However, teletype provides completely different functionality in phones.
How it works?
It is worth noting right away. For the TTY function in the iPhone to work, you need to buy a special adapter. In other phones, it works without an adapter, but for an iPhone it is needed.
The principle of operation is simple: one person types on the phone, and the other (at that end) hears it. That is, the text will be read by the program, and then it will be dictated by the voice to the interlocutor. In the opposite direction, this also works: one person says something into the microphone, his speech is recognized by the system, translated into text characters and sent to another interlocutor. He receives a text that he can read.
In principle, the idea is not bad, because in some cases it really helps people with weak speech or auditory abilities to communicate. Perhaps teletype was once popular, but today it is difficult to meet a person who has heard anything about him at all. And to find users who use this system is completely impossible. Moreover, some telecom operators do not even support it.
By the way, it’s better to disable this feature by default. When activated, it consumes battery power. To do this, you need to go to the smartphone settings - basic - TTY. Click on this option and disable it. Although this feature is disabled by default, users can unknowingly enable it unintentionally.
Why is the TTY function irrelevant?
Firstly, this technology has become obsolete, and many modern new smartphones do not have such functionality. They simply do not make much sense, since few people use this function. Secondly, as mentioned above, many people used it, including deaf-mute people, they don’t know that this is TTY on an iPhone, so they don’t use it. Such functionality is not advertised on TV, unlike, for example, smartphone cameras, memory or processors.
Thirdly, the development of high-speed 3G / 4g networks has brought this technology to nothing. Most users prefer chatting on social networks rather than just talking on the phone. There is also Skype, which generally allows you to establish video communications, so functions like TTY gradually disappear from smartphones. This is logical, teletype is no longer relevant, so it is unlikely that you will ever need it.
Now you know that this is TTY on the iPhone, as well as the fact that it is of little use. However, for the sake of interest, we recommend trying to communicate in this way. You can buy a special adapter for iPhone in the AppStore store.