C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
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TL;DR
- Call for Me on Pixel 11 phones makes it easy to have Gemini call businesses on your behalf.
- Google could be planning to expand that functionality to also support interactions with friends and family
- Users could have Gemini call your contacts to share information with them, or ask questions and report the answers back to you.
How many phone calls have you put off just because dealing with another person can feel so tedious? AI has already promised to automate plenty of thankless tasks in our lives, and for a certain kind of person, maybe one of the most appealing possibilities there is making phone calls on our behalf. We just saw Google introduce Call for Me on the Pixel 11 series, and now we’re already getting an early look at what could be a big new expansion for what it’s capable of doing.
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That sounds great, but it’s also fairly limited in its scope. If Gemini is a general-purpose language model, why not let it spread its wings a little bit and expand Call for Me to also support personal calls to our friends and family? Poking around some new updates, we’re finding early evidence for what looks like just that:
As you can see from those “Mom” and “John” examples on the introductory screen, this version of Call for Me would clearly be equipped to handle interactions beyond those with businesses. It does sound like Gemini may be a bit limited in what it’s able to do during these calls, largely just delivering messages or making basic inquiries, but we see how this could be really handy for things like dealing with people who are bad at responding to text messages.
Not everyone wants to talk to a computer, though. Thankfully, it looks like Gemini will also be giving people the ability to opt out of receiving these calls.
Alongside this expanded Call for Me functionality, we’re also able to pull up some granular permissions for app actions in that new write/delete section you see in the third screen above.
We’re able to surface similar menus for other apps, but so far this component still feels very much like a work in progress, with the options not properly functioning in our testing.
As for the expanded Call for Me functionality, we can’t say when Google might actually make this available — assuming it even does — but we’re already putting together some lists of contacts we’d love to try it with.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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