Google’s ‘Hold for Me’ Assistant feature can keep an eye on the phone call when you are on hold


Google has integrated its powerful voice recognition software and its Google Assistant in many of their apps and software, such as Call Screen, which is a solution to reduce the possibility of picking up spam calls. Now, Google has added yet another feature — Hold For Me, where the Google Assistant will monitor your call on hold and notify the user when the operator on the other end returns.

Often, when you call Toll-Free numbers and many businesses, you will be put on hold, sometimes for several minutes. It is easy to see how this might be a waste of time for many when they could be doing other things. Soon, with the Google Phone app, you won’t have to.

With Hold For Me enabled, as soon as you are put on hold, you can have the Google Assistant monitor the call for you as you continue doing other things. As soon as the person on the other line returns, the Assistant will notify the user with a sound, vibration and a prompt on your screen. Hold For Me will be an optional setting available in the Google Phone app’s Settings Page.

The feature works with Google’s Duplex technology, that can detect and differentiate if the sound on the other side of the call is music/recorded voices or an actual human voice. Since this uses on-device machine learning, the recordings are not sent to the cloud, thereby ensuring privacy.

Hold For Me will be arriving to the Pixel 4a 5G and the Pixel 5 for customers in the US as an early preview. If Google’s history with these features is observed, we can expect Hold For Me to come to older Pixel devices and maybe even third party phones via the Google Phone app.

In related news, the Google Phone app recently got a new feature called Verified calls that let business verify their phone number to increase the chances of customers picking up their calls.