In an age ofrobocallsand automated voice prompts, the Google Pixel series has a massively underrated set of features named Call Assist. This includes tools likeCall Screen, which has a scary-good AI voice that can talk to unknown callers before ringing your phone, and one calledHold for Methat can listen to that awful hold muzak when you call a toll-free number and let you know when an actual human comes on the line. Now, it appears Google is making some of this functionality available to all users through the Google Search app.
Pixel Call Assist: Everything you need to know
Google’s suite of calling features can make your life a whole lot easier
As spotted by9to5Googleand Android Police senior contributorMishaal Rahman on Twitter/X, Google Search has a new experiment that effectively replicates the Hold for Me experience without a Pixel phone. The feature can be enabled throughthe Labs menu, which is accessible by tapping the icon in the top-left corner in the Google app for Android, where you’ll see a new option calledTalk to a Live Representativeif it’s available to your account.
Toggling this feature on will cause aRequest a Callbutton to appear among the results when you search for certain types of businesses in the Google app. These include airlines, telecommunications companies, retail businesses, services, and insurance providers. Upon tapping this button, Google will initiate a call with the business, and then call you from a number it provides prior to the call whenever an agent comes on the line.
The feature is still in the process of rolling out to Search Labs users, and it was not available to any of our devices when testing today. Search Labs itself is available inover 120 countries, but Talk to a Live Representative is currently only available in the US. If this is anything like the Pixel’s Hold for Me feature, we wouldn’t expect to see it rolled outanywhere outside ofAustralia, Canada, Japan, the UK, or the US anytime soon.
