Announced back in May, Google is finally rolling out a feature that lets users make free phone calls via the Google Home. It will be made available in the United States and Canada, as of now. Google has started rolling it out and it could take up to a week for the feature to be rolled out to everyone.
At I/O, Google announced a feature that turns Google Home into a phone allowing users to make free phone calls to any landline or mobile phone users in their contacts or local businesses in the United States and Canada. All you need to do is ask, that’s it.
Let’s say if you want to order a sandwich or pizza then you can say something like “OK Google, call the nearest sandwich/ pizza shop,” it will then connect you to the nearby sandwich/ pizza shop.
Google Home has the capability to identify its user by recognizing his/ her voice. Suppose you are a family of four, Google Home can identify all four members correctly with its voice recognition technology. If you ask the smart home speaker to call your mom, it knows who you are and whose mom to call.
Amazon introduced similar voice calling and messaging on its Echo and Alexa App earlier this year, however, both companies have a different approach. With Google Home, it doesn’t matter if the recipient owns a Google Home or not. Home can call anyone in your contacts, however, with Amazon Echo or Alexa, you can only call those who owns Echo device or have Alexa app installed. Here comes one disadvantage with Home, you can’t make Home to Home calls, unlike Echo.
You need to make sure that your contacts are synced with Google Cloud in order to make calls. You can also speak a specific phone number you want Home to dial or ask it to call a local business. As of now, the calls will come from unknown or private numbers which people hesitate to answer because of all the spam calls these days. Google will soon allow users to set their personal number as caller ID, however, Google Voice or Project Fi users already can. You don’t need to configure any settings in order to make your first call unless you are a Google Voice/Project Fi user.
