Google's Gemini Will Now Make Phone Calls for You on Pixel 11

Google announced on Thursday an experimental beta feature called Call for Me, which lets its Gemini assistant place phone calls to businesses on your behalf — exclusively on the Pixel 11 in the US, in English, for users with a Gemini subscription who are enrolled in the Phone by Google app's public beta.

The feature marks Google's second attempt at AI-driven calling in nearly a decade. The company's earlier effort, Duplex, let the now-defunct Google Assistant call restaurants and book tables. Google shuttered that service a few years ago. Call for Me is round two, powered by modern large language models.

The use cases are deliberately mundane. Gemini can call your local hardware store to ask whether they stock a specific tool, or chat with a barber to schedule a haircut. You tell Gemini to make the call. It may ask follow-up questions to gather context. Then the chatbot introduces itself and conducts a back-and-forth conversation to ensure your request is handled.

The assistant can also handle the friction that comes with business phone lines. If it runs into an automated phone menu, it can navigate it. It can wait on hold. On your end, the Pixel displays a live transcript of the call, and you can take over the conversation at any point.

What Gemini will and won't dial

Google says the feature works best with businesses, and there are explicit limits. Gemini will not call emergency services. But it will call specific numbers you ask it to. "Gemini will try to search for a phone number, but you may provide one as well," a Google spokesperson told WIRED — useful for cases like a tattoo artist with little web presence.

The assistant's voice during these calls will be the same one used in Gemini Live interactions, even if your preferred Gemini voice has an accent.

Why this matters

Call for Me does not arrive in a vacuum. It extends a suite of smart calling features Google has already built into the Phone app on Pixels and Android, each of which moves more of the calling experience from human hands to software.

The Phone app can already screen incoming calls and block robocalls and telemarketers. Hold for Me lets the assistant listen for when the hold music ends and a live person picks up, then alerts you when it is your cue to talk. Direct My Call displays the options in an automated phone menu before the recorded voice reads them out, so you can tap "nine" and skip the recitation. The app also has real-time Scam Detection, which flags when it thinks the person on the other end is trying to scam you.

Cultural acceptance has shifted since the Duplex era. Call screening features now abound — on a Pixel, a Samsung, or an iPhone, onboard assistants routinely intercept unknown callers and ask why they are calling. Voice assistants handling phone calls is a little more accepted today than it was back then.

The hard part: real conversations

Acceptance is one problem. Competence is another. These kinds of features — much like hyped-up AI translation features — can often fall short. Calls are unpredictable. The person on the other end may hang up, assuming the call is just another spam call.

The open questions are concrete. What happens if Gemini does not understand a person's accent all that well? Will it trap the clerk in an endless loop of asking them to repeat themselves? If the shop does not have the tool you need, does the bot know how to bow out politely — or just cut the line?

Google acknowledges those gaps. "That is exactly what we want to continue testing," the spokesperson said. "With this experiment, we look forward to users testing a variety of cases, so that we can continue to improve the feature across accents and noisy environments."

And on the exit question, at least, Google has an answer: it says Gemini will "politely" hang up if the business cannot accommodate your needs.

The beta framing is doing real work here. The enrollment requirements — a Pixel 11, a Gemini subscription, and the Phone by Google public beta — signal that Google expects failures and wants a controlled population of users generating edge cases before any wider rollout.

Two bots on the line

The feature points to a future where AI agents take over routine business calls altogether. The other end of the line is changing too. Businesses are experimenting with AI tools to interface with customers — the California pizza chain Pizza My Heart, for instance, lets customers text its Jimmy the Surfer chatbot to order pizza.

Put the two together and the trajectory is short. It does not seem too far off that you will ask your phone to call a restaurant, and the restaurant's AI will answer. The machines will be talking to each other — debating whether you want the stuffed crust.