Google’s introduction of its new Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones Thursday features renewed attention to what can seem the least interesting part of these devices: the app through which you place and receive phone calls.
“We see a big opportunity to apply Google’s AI to yield a better experience,” says Jonathan Eccles, group product manager for Google’s Phone app. “Time spent on a phone should be time well spent.”
The Pixel 7 and 7 Pro—the newest Android smartphones in the line Google launched in 2016 to show what its software could do on hardware of its design—bring some noteworthy updates to that core app. One should get your attention within moments of calling a company that greets customers with an IVR (“interactive voice response”) menu to cut down on its call-center budget.
Since a 2021 update, the Phone app’s Direct My Call feature has transcribed the canned greetings of IVR systems, showing the number of each menu option as the system speaks it.
But on the two new phones, the Phone app will leverage a growing database to show the menu options upfront—sort of like the cheat sheets at GetHuman or the memories you may have cached, except it’s built into the phone to help you barge through the IVR prompts.
Google isn’t naming companies covered by this feature—its blog post says “the most popular toll-free numbers in the U.S.”—and Eccles only characterizes the total covered as “a consistently growing number.” It’s also unclear what about this work requires the added computing prowess of the Tensor G2 processor in the new phones.
A second feature may not get your attention until you’re calling from a sufficiently noisy place. Clear Calling will use on-device machine learning powered by Tensor G2 to null out such background distractions as gusts of wind or other people in a restaurant on the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro.
The obvious parallel is the background-noise-cancellation “transparency mode” on Apple’s AirPods and a similar feature Facebook added in April of 2021 as part of a “social audio” initiative. But here, it’s built into the phone part of the phone, not confined to an expensive accessory or a social network with trust issues.
The Tensor G2 will also provide a slight messaging upgrade on the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro: real-time transcription of the voice messages people can send in place of writing out something—you know, if they’re confused about the entire point of phone messaging.
And like earlier Pixel phones, this pair of new models will continue to deliver such Pixel exclusives as Hold For Me (in which the Phone app listens to the hold music for you, then rings when it hears a human pick up—a godsend throughout a long year of flight delays and cancellations) and the Call Screen option that lets Google Assistant judge if a call is a spam and then require unknown callers to say who they are and why they’re calling.
The fact that those features remain Pixel exclusives—in the case of Call Screen, almost three years after its December 2019 debut—does, however, point to heightened stratification in the Android market.
The experience of Android has always been a little clumsier on non-Google phones, thanks mainly to the poor taste Samsung and other vendors have shown in tacking on unwanted apps and in replacing Google’s core apps with its own, less functional equivalents.
(Can anyone cite a good reason for Samsung to have shipped its own calendar and phone apps for Android? Can anyone name a must-have feature in those underwhelming understudies?)
So perhaps Google should be forgiven for trying to even the score and boost the so-far puny market share of Pixel phones, which the research firm Canalys put at just 2% of the North American market in the second quarter of 2022.
Eccles suggests that may not be the case forever, saying “stay tuned” in response to multiple questions about the possible arrival of these features on other companies’ Android phones, not to mention in Google’s own Google Voice app. But in the meantime, the result remains a wider gap between what Android can do and what most customers see—and hear—it doing.
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