Your Pixel phone’s call screen feature will soon support ‘AI responses’
Google Pixel phones include a Call Screen feature that could soon be upgraded with new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, according to a report. The Mountain View-based tech giant is reportedly working on an ‘AI Replies’ feature that will generate smart responses based on what the caller has said, instead of the canned responses seen in the current version of Call Screen. The feature is currently in development, so it won’t be visible in the latest version of the Phone app on Pixel devices and could be rolled out to the company’s devices in the future.
Google Pixel is reportedly getting AI responses in call screen
The Call Screen feature in the Phone app on Pixel smartphones allows users to set the Google Assistant to receive incoming calls and ask why the call was placed. It is available in select regions (not India) and works on all Pixel smartphones.
Last year, Google added the Contextual Reply feature to Call Screen, which allows users to respond to the caller if they don’t want to answer a call. For example, if the Call Screening feature tells the user that he or she is receiving an incoming call about booking a doctor’s appointment, users can choose to confirm or decline the appointment and the on-device assistant can inform the caller the same.
While useful in certain scenarios, this feature is quite limited in the number of responses a user can send, and will not work if the caller’s response is too complex. Now an Android Authority APK breakdown reveals that the company is working to make contextual responses better with “AI Replies.”
AI answers in Google Pixel’s call screen feature
Photo credit: Android Authority/AssembleDebug
The publication say that the company could use AI to process the caller’s response and show the user more relevant answers. Based on the image, AI Replies is described as “Call Assist suggests new AI-powered smart replies based on the caller’s Call Screen responses.”
9to5Google too buried the Phone app of a Pixel smartphone to find more evidence of the feature. The publication found strings of code indicating that the AI-generated responses were internally referred to as “dobby.” Another string of code reportedly revealed that the feature will be powered by “dobby LLM”.
This is believed to be a codename for Gemini Nano, which already powers some of the AI features in the Google Pixel 9 series. However, the company could also use a separate large language model to enable this feature. Currently, Google has not shared any information about when AI Replies in Call Screen might be released.
