Google's Gemini Can Now Call Businesses for You — Meet "Call for Me"

Google just took one of life's most annoying chores off your plate.

Announced Thursday, the company's experimental new "Call for Me" feature lets Gemini ring up local businesses on your behalf. Need to check whether a store has a product in stock, book a restaurant table, move an appointment, or put an item on hold? Hand the phone call to Gemini.

Here's how it works. You describe the task — say, reserving a table for two on Friday night — and Gemini places the call. It navigates automated phone menus, waits on hold for as long as it takes, and then talks to a real employee to get the job done. Gemini identifies itself as an AI at the start of the call and only shares personal details you've approved, like your name or a booking reference. While it's on the line, you watch a live transcript unfold on your screen, and you can jump in and take over the call at any moment. The calls go out from your own phone number, so the business sees a familiar caller.

There are limits, for now. "Call for Me" is available only to Pixel 11 owners in the US who have a paid Gemini subscription and are enrolled in the Phone by Google beta. Google is framing the rollout as an experiment, noting that "real-world conversations are nuanced" — a polite way of saying phone calls with actual humans are messy, unpredictable things that AI still needs to learn to handle gracefully.

Why it matters: this is the phone going agentic. Google first showed off the idea back at I/O 2018, when its Duplex demo had an AI booking a hair salon appointment over the phone — a demo that stunned the industry and raised a wave of questions about AI disclosure. Eight years later, the concept is shipping as a real product, with disclosure built in from the start. If it works, the humble phone call — long considered the last bastion of human-only interaction — becomes just another task you can delegate.

Our take: phone anxiety is real, and hold music is a tax on everyone's time. Automating the boring calls is an obvious win — as long as businesses know they're talking to a bot and users stay in control. Google seems to have learned the right lessons from the Duplex era. Now the question is how fast "Call for Me" expands beyond Pixel owners in the US. The rest of us will be waiting by the phone.