How to Mute Dial Sounds on iPhone

iPhone users may wonder how they can mute the dialing sound effects that are played when a phone number is being dialed into the numeric keypad on an iPhone. Each time you press a number button on the phone keyboard, a new sound effect plays. Some of you may be thinking, that’s great and all but how do you turn off those sound effects when dialing a number, so that I can dial a number in silence from the iPhone?

It turns out there is a way to silence the audio sound effects when dialing phone numbers on an iPhone, read on to learn how to accomplish the task.

If you’re interested in some quick background, the sounds played while dialing a number on iPhone are actually the same as you’d hear on any other traditional touch tone DTMF phone, with each dialed number having a unique dial tone sound associated with it. While those numerical audio signals were necessary in the pre-cell phone era, nowadays the sound effects are no longer needed to simply dial a number successfully, but the sound effects persist even on modern smart phones like an iPhone. It’s a historical artifact of dialing numbers that many users like, and for many people there is a strong recognition for the sounds and dialing numbers, where you can often tell a number is being entered wrong simply by hearing it incorrectly. Anyway, some people may want to just dial a phone number on their iPhone in silence without the dialing tones being played out loud, so that’s what we’re going to focus on here.

How do you turn off dialing sounds on iPhone when dialing a phone number?

There are a few different ways to mute the playing of dialing sound effects when entering a phone number onto iPhone. We’ll cover the two simplest methods to silencing the keypad tone sounds; using the mute switch, and using headphones.

Quick Note: turning off keyboard clicks and keyboard sound effects on the iPhone and iPad currently won’t disable the dialing sound effects, as the phone dialing sounds are technically not a keyboard sound effect.

1: Turn Off Dialing Sounds by Muting the iPhone

The first approach to silencing the iPhone dialing sound effects is to simply mute the iPhone. This is easy, because all iPhone devices have a hardware mute switch on the side of each model, next to the volume buttons.

Simply look at the side of the iPhone and find the little Mute switch and activate it. Flip it on, so that you can see a little red indicator, when that red indicator in the mute switch is visible it means the Mute button is active and the iPhone is muted for all sounds, including the muting of the dialing sounds.

Just remember to toggle the Mute button switch back off again if you don’t want to keep the iPhone in silent mode, because everything on the iPhone will not produce sound if the Mute button is enabled and instead the device will just vibrate. This includes all audio, whether it’s incoming phone call ringtones, text message alert sounds, alert sounds, external music, the camera sound, and any audio or video coming out of videos or apps. The mute button is all encompassing on iPhone, which is why it works to turn off the dialing sounds too, as long as that mute switch is enabled.

2: Silence External Dialing Sound Effects on iPhone by Using Headphones

If you use headphones, or have any plugged into the iPhone, then dialing in the Phone app will not make external sounds through the iPhone speakers, instead they will play the dial sounds through the headphones, earbuds, or Airpods.

You can also plug in a set of headphones to the iPhone and not even use them simply to accomplish the silencing of the dialing sounds.

This isn’t technically muting the sound effect or turning them off, it simply redirects the sound effects when dialing through the audio output of the headphone jack, or the Lightning port if your iPhone is courageous without a headphone port.

Whether or not it’s easier for you to mute the dialing sounds on an iPhone by using the Mute button or by using headphones is entirely up to you and how you use your device, but for most users the Mute switch is probably the best approach.

As mentioned earlier, there is no setting for disabling or turning off the dial sound effects on iPhone. But it’s always possible that future iOS releases will include a toggle setting for silencing the dial tone sounds on an iPhone as some kind of option, or maybe even do away with them completely.

Personally I like the sound effects when dialing a number, but I am also one of those geeks that digs up DTMF tones buried on their Mac and plays around with them because, well, I’m a geek and that’s the type of thing I find to be interesting. But anytime I don’t want the iPhone to make a sound when dialing I just toggle the mute switch, but every user is different. Just use what works for you.