According to the report, Google Pixel phones include a Call Screen feature that may soon be updated with new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The Mountain View-based tech giant is reportedly working on an “Artificial Intelligence Answers” feature that will generate intelligent responses based on what the caller said, instead of the standard responses seen in the current version of Call Screen. The feature is currently under 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.
The Google Pixel will reportedly receive AI responses on the call screen
The Call Screen feature in the Phone app on Pixel smartphones allows users to set up Google Assistant to receive incoming calls and ask about the reason for the call. It is available in select regions (not India) and works on all Pixel smartphones.
Last year, Google added a contextual reply feature to Call Screen, which allowed users to reply to a caller if they didn’t want to answer the call. For example, if Call Screen notified the user that they were receiving an incoming call about a doctor’s appointment, users could choose between confirming or declining the appointment, and the on-device assistant could notify the caller of the same.
While this feature is useful in certain situations, it’s quite limited in the range of responses a user can send, and it doesn’t work if the caller’s response is too complex. Now, Android Authority’s teardown of the APK reveals that the company is working on improving contextual responses with “AI Answers.”
AI responses in Google Pixel’s Call Screen feature
Photo: Android Authority/AssembleDebug
The publication says that the company can use artificial intelligence to process the caller’s answer and show the user more relevant answers. Based on the image, the AI responses are described as “Call Assist offers new smart AI-based responses based on Call Screen caller responses.”
9to5Google also examined the Phone app on the Pixel smartphone to find more evidence of the feature. The publication found lines of code that suggested the AI-generated responses were internally called “dobby.” Another line of code reportedly revealed that the feature would work on “dobby LLM”.
It is believed to be codenamed Gemini Nano, which already supports some AI features in the Google Pixel 9 series. However, the company may also use a separate large language model to enable the feature. So far, Google hasn’t provided any information on when Call Screen’s AI responses might be released.