Contacting major service providers is something we all do quite often in our daily lives and frankly most of the time it is not that pleasant. One major reason for this unpleasant experience is the amount of time you spend waiting for a representative. Call centers work with actual human beings and there is a limit to what number of people they can cater at a time. Therefore waiting is inherent to this service model. Call centers get overwhelmed pretty easily which leads to long waiting queues.
While you can’t just outright replace human representatives Google might have a solution for the long waiting times. Google’s new creation is called Hold for Me. The application brings a simple yet useful feature for phones. Essentially, this application will monitor the call for you while it’s on waiting.
Once an actual person picks up the call on the other side it will then notify the user in their desired mode. This could be a notification, a sound, or simply a vibration alert. This means that users no longer have to leave everything while they listen to random music waiting for someone to finally answer and solve their problems.
Goole is currently testing out this new feature on their latest pixel phones. They hope to release this feature for a wider audience if the trials show promising results. The main goal here is to successfully train this application to differentiate between a human voice and computer-generated alerts and advertisements.
For people whose workflow requires them to call various call centers, this can be a lifesaver. It will save tons of time that they waste while waiting on these calls. With Hold for Me waiting for you you can give you attention to other more pressing matters.
Past Developments:
This is definitely not the first time Google has implemented services to improve the in-call experience for its users. At one of their previous events, they announced a call screening service for Google Assistant. The feature is not a lot more matured and a standard part of Pixel phones. Call Screening is basically doing something similar to this application but it is on the user side and the other person talking will always be a human in most cases.
In case you don’t know how it works with the call screening option your Google Assistant will screen the call and ask who’s calling and why. You’ll get a real-time transcript of how the caller responds. The assistant will ask the called a bunch of predefined question that determines their information and reason for calling. This feature is extremely helpful in certain situations when you can’t pick up your phone. Call Screening is also capable of Scheduling meetings and setting up reminders. It can even call certain reservation services and make reservations in your name.
Now a full voice recognition and the smart answering systems are still in development. These small applications are the little steps we have to go through in order to develop the ultimate AI-powered smart assistant. Google among numerous other tech companies is currently working on developing various solutions in the field. let’s hope that Google continues to bring us these exciting new features in the days to come.
lastly, Hold for me is available as a beta for Pixel devices right now. You can enable it by the settings of your Google device. It will then wait for you whenever you are on a toll-free number and put on hold. Furthermore, it is completely safe to use as none of your personal data is shared with google. Unless you agree to it. Even then this data is only used to improve the service. More information here.