IT之家 News from 10/6 — How many phone calls have you kept putting off simply because communicating with another person is such a hassle? Artificial intelligence has long promised to automate a lot of the tedious, thankless chores in our lives. For some people, perhaps the most appealing of these ideas is having AI make phone calls for us. Google has just launched the "Call for Me" feature on the Pixel 11 series of phones, and now there are signs that this feature may be about to receive a major expansion.
According to IT之家, the current Call for Me is specifically designed for calling various businesses — it can patiently listen to hold music while waiting to be connected, and help with tasks like making appointments.
That sounds great, but the feature's scope of use is still quite limited. Since Gemini is a general-purpose large language model, why not further open up its capabilities and expand Call for Me to support calling friends and family personally? While examining some new update content,Android Authority found early clues suggesting that Google appears to be planning to do just that.
From the examples of "Mom" and "John" on the introduction screen, it is clear that this version of Call for Me is no longer limited to communicating with businesses. The tasks Gemini can perform in such calls still appear to be subject to certain constraints — mostly just relaying messages or conducting simple inquiries. But it is not hard to imagine that this feature would be very useful when dealing with people who really dislike replying to text messages.
Of course, not everyone is willing to talk to a machine. Gemini also appears to offer an option allowing users to refuse to receive such AI-made calls.
In addition to the Call for Me capability upgrade, foreign media also discovered finer-grained permission settings for app actions, namely the new write and delete sections visible in the third screenshot above. This module is apparently still under development, and its various options do not yet work.
As for the upgraded Call for Me feature, it remains uncertain when Google will officially launch it (it is not even certain that Google will actually release it).