Amazon recently added voice calling features to its Alexa-enabled line of smart speaker and… other things. Now it’s Google’s turn, but the company is taking a slightly different approach.
While Amazon’s Alexa Calling & Messaging features are for device-to-device calls, the Google Home smart speaker now lets you call a phone number using your voice. And it’s free.
The feature works in the US and Canada and lets you call land lines or cellphones.
Since it’s tied to Google Assistant, it can also use what Google knows about you to simplify the calling process. For instance, if you say “Hey Google, call mom,” it will use voice recognition to figure out who you are, look for your mom in your contact list, and place a call to the correct person. If someone else with an account tied to your device does the same thing, it’ll call that person’s mom instead.
Calls are routed over the internet, and for now that means that recipients won’t see your information in their caller ID field unless you’re already a Google Voice or Project Fi user (but even then, you still need to enable the feature). Google says by the end of the year, Google Home calls should be able to show the phone numbers for all users in caller ID.
The lack of need for a Google voice account seems interesting. Neat!
Does this mean Google Homes can call (911)?
so not available yet, something they will enable in future update?
Place phone on counter and set on speaker mode. That has been working for me.