Google Home’s Calling Feature Could be Released Soon
Back in February of this year, there was a report going around that talked about a new calling feature that was being worked on for both Google Home as well as Amazon’s Echo devices. The report seemed credible at the time, but we shouldn’t ever get excited about something that hasn’t been officially announced because there could be conflicts that keep it from being launched. Then in May we actually saw Amazon roll out this on-device calling feature to their Alexa devices.
Google I/O 2017 was held in May as well and the Mountain View tech giant indeed confirmed that hands-free calling capabilities was coming to Google Home sometime in the future. The service is said to let you call any phone number in the United States and Canada and it is also setup to use your own numbers as the outgoing numbers (for caller ID purposes). However, we didn’t hear anything about a release date for the feature and many of us have been waiting for it to roll out.
While we still don’t have a release date for the feature, we may be getting incredibly close to the official rollout. Reddit user andybaseclef over in the /r/GoogleHome subreddit discovered the feature was live and working on their device. They uploaded a video of it in action (which you can watch here), and it showed them successfully placing a call to a local business. It was all initiated hands-free and the call was ended by saying “OK, Google…hang up.”
However, it seems as if the feature was short lived. Within the same hour that they uploaded the video and made the post on Reddit, they came back with a new comment saying the feature was now gone. So it’s possible that Google jumped the gun on the rollout and then quickly reverted back/disabled the feature until they were ready to announce it. Whatever happened though, it looks like we’re getting very close to the feature being live for everyone.
Source: /r/GoogleHome
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