After briefly announcing a new ‘Hold for Me’ feature coming to the Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G during the Launch Night In event, Google shared a blog post with more details about the new feature.
Hold for Me will come with the Google Phone app as a preview on the new Pixel smartphones in the U.S. and handles annoying ‘holds’ when you call businesses. Google says it works when users call a toll-free number and the business puts you on hold. A small pop-up appears on the screen that will let Google Assistant take over a call and wait on hold while you focus on something else.
When a real person finally picks up your call, Google Assistant will make a sound, vibrate your phone and show an on-screen prompt to let you know so you can return to the call.
In the blog post, Google explains that Hold for Me leverages its Duplex technology to recognize hold music and recorded messages. Duplex, if you remember, was an artificial intelligence technology the company showed off a few years ago that could handle different call tasks. Initially, Google envisioned Duplex as a service people could leverage to make reservations or book appointments on their behalf. It saw testing in limited parts of the U.S. and recently expanded to Canada.
Now that same technology powers ‘Hold for Me’ by recognizing hold music, recorded messages and real people, which allows the feature to let you know when an actual representative arrives to take your call. Plus, Google says Hold for Me processes audio entirely on-device and doesn’t require a Wi-Fi or data connection. That speeds up the feature and also helps protect customer privacy. Google also notes that when users return to the call after using Hold for Me, the system stops processing the audio.
Finally, Google says that user feedback on the Hold for Me preview will help it “bring the feature to more people over the coming months.” Hopefully that means expanding Hold for Me beyond the U.S. and into other countries like Canada.
Source: Google
