Add a “Dial Extension” Button to Contacts on iPhone
Though you’ve long been able to add automatically dialed extensions to contacts on the iPhone, the newest versions of iOS handle extensions much more intelligently, allowing you to create a “Dial Extension” button to any specific contact. That extension dialer can be activated manually, making the navigation of telephony menus infinitely easier, here’s how to quickly add this to a contact:
- Open Contacts and tap the contact name to add the extension to, then tap the “Edit” button
- Tap the phone number entry, place the cursor at the end, then tap the “+*#” button to access additional options
- Choose “wait” then enter the extension afterwards, it will add a semicolon and the extension afterwards to the address appearing like so: 1-888-555-5555;123
- Tap “Done” and exit out of contacts
- Now dial the contact to discover a “Dial 123″ button has appeared, tap that whenever you want to dial the extension
The extensions can also be added from a Mac in Contacts (Address Book) by adding a semicolon to numbers followed by an extension, just be sure to sync it through the same iCloud account or it won’t go over to the iPhone.
Anyone who frequently uses extensions to reach specific people at an office, or anyone who has battled an automated phone system knows how useful this can be. You can even set a string of numbers, though the Dial button remains the same.
Snow phone! Though with that example the auto-dial “1″ would be better I think.
Nice trick though as usual, thanks.
Thank you so much! I didn’t know this!
If you don’t want to use the Dial 123 option, you can replace the wait with a pause (I typically use 2 pauses) after which the phone will send the extension tones.
using the example in the main article the number would become.
1-888-555-5555,,123 (“,” inserts ~ 2 second delay)
This is great for conference calls, as you can string together multiple numbers to automatically dial the call bridge, enter the bridge code, pause for name announcement as follows
1-888-555-5555,,#,,,,#
This type of number command sequence works on every cell phone
oooh!! that’s a good trick .. Thanks4u
wow, my 15 year old Nokia phone did this (; was actually a p). Is this really a new feature in iOS6? Is the iPhone really being developed by people who have never used a cell phone before? Imagine how much better it would have been if they actually had some prior experience.
The “Dial #” button is new, but of course inserting pauses and then sending more numbers is NOT new.
Using a comma for a pause in phone number strings goes back at least to the days of dial-up modems, where you might first have to dial a number to get an outside line, then the phone number itself, and so on. A comma is used to insert a pause to allow time for the preceding action to complete. It still works on most autodial systems, cellphones or otherwise.
What’s new here is using a semicolon to generate the manual “Dial #” button. No giant big deal, but it’s a nice implementation that I can imagine being useful on occasion.