Google Assistant Can Now Stay On Hold For You While You Do Other Stuff

Sometimes when you try to get in touch with a company’s customer service, depending on the volume of calls and complexity of your question, you might need to be put on hold. This is fine, but sometimes it can be a bit of a wait in which you can’t really do anything else except to wait, but not anymore.

If you have an Android device, Google has recently updated its Phone app where it seems that it will now be more integrated with Google Assistant who will stay on the line for you. What this means is that users who are put on hold will now be able to get Google Assistant to take their place while they go and do something else on their phone.

When the other person ends the hold, Google Assistant will then prompt you with sound, vibrations, and an on-screen notification to let you know that the other person is back. According to Google, the new Hold for Me feature is powered by the company’s Duplex AI system, which they claim is smarter about these sorts of things.

They claim that it will be able to differentiate between the different systems that companies might use for their customer service platform, and can recognize the difference between a prerecorded message that’s thanking you for staying on the line, and also hold music. It sounds pretty cool, but unfortunately for now it is only available as an early preview for Google’s recently announced Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G models.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Android, Google, Google Assistant