Switch default Voice Mail from Visual to basic? Also tiny voice recognition issue

[Hamdroid]

Yesterday I finally retired my Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and came home clutching a shiny new LG G3.  I am absolutely loving almost everything about it, especially the fact that it finds and stays connected to wifi and cell voice and data signals in parts of my house that the Nexus couldn't handle.    The handwriting recognition was a nice surprise, didn't realize it had it, and it works really well.  A couple of my apps refused to install but I found others with the same functionality that work fine.

Anyway - two little quibbles that maybe someone has found an answer for in 2 of the apps preloaded on the phone.  I am not interested in using Visual Voice Mail, I set up a separate generic icon which does a direct dial to standard voice mail (*86), but think it would be really nifty if I could "disconnect" VVM from the VM icon in the phone app and replace it with plain old *86.  Just be a convenience to access regular VM directly from the phone app. Any one have any ideas on this?

Also, the voice recognition in the Email app does not capitalize the first letter in a new sentence, nor does it automatically create a space after a punctuation mark.  Works fine in the Gmail and other various apps, just not this one.  This works fine if I'm using the keyboard in Email, just not voice.   I can't for the life of me figure out where to configure this, if it is indeed configurable and not just a bug.

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Debbie

[Hamdroid]

And to answer my own question, in case someone else is looking for the same answer, after a whole bunch of digging around I found the ridiculously simple answer in another discussion somewhere in this overall forum (Verizon tech support did not hit on this particular solution):

Simply log onto the My Verizon web site, go to Change Features, and Visual Voice Mail basic will probably show up as one of your subscribed features.  Remove it, go through the rest of the process to finalize, then restart your phone.  Voila, the voice mail icons/buttons etc should now just call up regular voice mail.

[tomkkk]

I can't find any way to turn off Visual Voice Mail like this on the current site but I'd really like to not have to dial *86 to retrieve voice mail. Does anyone know of any way to do what the O.P. asked now?

Alternatively, the O.P. mentioned creating a custom icon that dials *86. How does one do that?

[Snn5 · Accepted solution]

Long pressing "1" on the phone dialer is the only other way I know to dial *86.  The VM icon on the dialer at the bottom is visual VM.