Voicemails are terrible. Anyone willing to sit through the message and talk to a machine rather than send you a text message probably doesn't have good news. Android M will make the whole process a little less painful with native visual voicemail. It's just a basic implementation in the preview, and it won't work on all carriers just yet. Still, pretty cool.

According to a ticket in the Android issue tracker, Google plans to include support for Orange in France right now and T-Mobile US in the final M release. Other carriers will come later, but it looks like T-Mobile voicemail is already working in the preview despite what the tracker says (see above via +Danny Hollis). I bet Fi will be supported too—it would only make sense. The M dialer has a tab for voicemail in M, which will show all available messages for playback and management.

The original ticket also asked for transcriptions, but that's dependent on carriers to support. The Google implementation will technically have this feature, but it won't do anything until someone takes advantage of it.