Google Tests 'Call for Me' Feature That Lets Gemini Make Phone Calls to Businesses

Google is testing a feature called "Call for Me" that lets its Gemini assistant place phone calls to businesses on a user's behalf, according to a TechCrunch report. The feature is currently limited to Pixel 11 owners in the US who have a paid Gemini subscription and are running the beta version of Google's Phone app.

How it works

According to Google, Gemini can share personal information that users have pre-approved, allowing it to handle tasks such as making restaurant reservations, rescheduling appointments, or checking whether a store has a specific product in stock. The AI navigates automated phone menus, waits on hold, and places calls using the user's own phone number rather than a masked or third-party line.

Users can follow the conversation in real time through a live transcript and can take over the call manually at any point if the AI struggles or the conversation requires human judgment.

Limited rollout by design

Google says it is deliberately starting with a narrow release. The company notes that real-world phone conversations involve significant nuance — unpredictable menu structures, hold times, and human responses that can vary widely by business. Restricting the beta to a single device, region, and subscription tier lets Google gather feedback before a broader launch. Additional details are available on Google's support page, though the company has not disclosed a timeline for wider availability.

Context: not Google's first attempt

"Call for Me" builds on Google Duplex, the company's 2018 demo that showed an AI assistant booking a hair salon appointment by phone with humanlike speech patterns, including filler words like "um" and "uh." Duplex drew both attention and scrutiny at the time over questions of AI disclosure during calls — a concern that live transcripts and user-takeover controls in "Call for Me" appear designed to address.

Google isn't alone in pursuing this capability. Meta's AI agents, Muse and Instinct, can reportedly now also make phone calls, suggesting voice-based task automation is becoming a competitive front among major AI assistants.

What this means

Phone-based task automation remains one of the harder problems in consumer AI: it requires real-time speech understanding, navigation of unstructured business phone systems, and handling of edge cases where a human would need to intervene. Google's cautious rollout — one device, one country, one subscription tier — signals that the company is still validating reliability before scaling. The bigger open question is disclosure: businesses receiving these calls aren't necessarily told they're talking to an AI, which could reignite the same transparency debates that followed Duplex's debut nearly a decade ago. If Meta is shipping similar functionality in Muse and Instinct, expect this to become a standard feature across major assistants within the next year rather than a novelty.