Google Assistant on Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a has a new Hold For Me feature. And this might be the feature you didn’t think you needed a solution for.
The feature lets you skip the monotonous hold tone on business calls. Your Google Assistant will listen to the tone and the repetitive messages for you.
Google revealed this feature in an early preview of Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a. If you are put on hold by businesses or by toll-free numbers, you can make use of it. Your Google Assistant will notify you with sound, vibration, and a prompt on your screen. This way, you save your precious time and talk once the line is free.
Sharing a statement about the feature, Google said:
We gathered feedback from a number of companies, including Dell and United, as well as from studies with customer support representatives, to help us design these interactions and make the feature as helpful as possible to the people on both sides of the call.
Google’s Duplex technology powers the “Hold for Me” feature. It identifies hold music and also differentiates whether a sound is recorded or not. Once the hold tone or recorded message disappears, Google Assistant will notify you. It will also ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call.
This is an optional feature that you can enable in settings. You can choose to activate it during each call to a toll-free number. Also, unless you decide to, no audio from the call will be shared with Google or saved to your Google account.