According to a report, Google Pixel phones include a call screen feature that may soon be upgraded with new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The Mountain View-based tech giant is reportedly working on an ‘AI Reply’ feature that will generate smart replies based on what the caller has said, instead of the standard replies seen in the current version of the call screen. The feature is currently under development, so it won’t appear in the latest version of the Phone app on Pixel devices, and may be introduced to the company’s devices in the future.
Google Pixel will reportedly get AI answers on call screens
The Call Screen feature in the Phone app on Pixel smartphones allows users to set the Google Assistant to receive an incoming call and ask why the call was placed on hold. It is available in select regions (not India) and works on all Pixel smartphones.
Last year, Google added the contextual reply feature to the call screen, which allowed users to reply to the caller if they did not wish to answer the call. For example, if the call screen feature tells the user they have an incoming call about booking an appointment at a doctor’s office, the user can choose between confirming and declining the appointment and on-device. The assistant can provide this information to the caller.
While useful in some scenarios, this feature is quite limited in the range of responses a user can send, and does not work if the caller’s response is too complex. Now, an Android Authority APK teardown reveals that the company is working on improving contextual replies with “AI Reply.”
AI replies in Google Pixel’s call screen feature
Photo Credit: Android Authority/AssembleDebug
The publication states that the company may use AI to process caller responses and show more relevant answers to the user. Based on the image, AI Reply is described as “Call Assist suggests new AI-powered smart answers based on the caller’s call screen responses.”
9to5Google also dug into the Phone app of Pixel smartphones to find more evidence of the feature. Code strings in the publication revealed that the AI-generated answers were being called “dobby” internally. Another string of code reportedly revealed that the facility would be operated by “Dobby LLM”.
It is believed to be the codename for Gemini Nano which already powers some AI features in the Google Pixel 9 series. However, the company may also use a different larger language model to power this feature. At present, Google has not shared any information about when AI replies can be released in the call screen.
