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Hold music could one day be a thing of the past thanks to a service coming to Google smartphones.
Hold for Me, which launches Thursday in the US for owners of Google’s Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a phones, involves Google’s artificial intelligence tools taking over as an automatic secretary when on hold in a call center, leaving the user free to hang up the phone and get on with life.
The service will listen when the call is answered and send a notification when it is time for the user to return to the phone. Meanwhile, the Google Assistant will ask the call center to wait, hopefully preventing them from hanging up for shortness of breath.
“Every company’s waiting loop is different and simple algorithms cannot accurately detect when a customer service representative answers the call,” said Google’s Andrew Goodman and Joseph Cherukara. “Hold for Me works with Google’s Duplex technology, which not only recognizes music on hold, but also understands the difference between a recorded message (like ‘Hello, thanks for waiting’) and a representative on the line.”
The service has some limitations. The initial launch is extremely limited – the Pixel 5 phone has a reported production of just 800,000 units, and Google has yet to announce any plans to roll out the service on other devices. Also, it only works in the US with toll free numbers.
At the heart of the feature is Google’s Duplex, the sometimes controversial technology the company has used to deliver an increasing amount of phone-based automation.
First launched in 2018, Duplex allows Google users to automatically schedule appointments and make restaurant reservations, with the AI assistant making the phone call.
When announced, speech synthesis was so realistic, even introducing “er” and “mmm-hmm” to fill in the gaps between words, that some criticized it as “misleading.” A week after launch, Google promised that the software would identify itself as a robot when calling companies.
Google has also used Duplex behind the scenes to help it gather information for its Maps product. By using it to automatically call businesses and ask about their opening hours, Google was able to fill in the blanks in their data for businesses with poor websites.
