Google is prepping Gemini to call your friends and family instead of you

Google Gemini's Call for Me is expanding from just business calls, into personal calls, according to details seen in the latest updates.

This would mean Gemini would be capable of calling your nearest and dearest, and while the functionality looks to be on the limited side, Call for Me will be able to ask simple questions and relay messages. Of course, whether you want to give up talking to your friends and family, so a robot can is another question entirely.

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By  Rajesh Pandey

Call for Me may soon mean you never need to make another call again

But is that really a good thing?

Call for Me debuted last month on the Pixel 11, and it has a simple premise: Gemini makes calls to businesses for you, making or changing appointments, so you don't have to call yourself.

The reception was mixed, to say the least. While some appreciate the time-saving elements here, others are keenly aware of how this sort of technology further increases isolation and loneliness within society. Plus, who wants to talk to robots instead of people?

This news comes from a new update to the Phone app, which Android Authority was able to dig into. These screenshots show some examples of what Gemini may be able to do in the future, and it includes options for calling "John" or "Mom", and delivering a message or asking a simple question. While it's not spelled out in the hacked build, it's a clear implication that Call for Me is prepping to go beyond businesses and expand into personal calls.

It also looks as if there's an option to bar the AI from calling you, but good luck getting your mom or grandmother to turn that setting on.

This feature isn't available yet, and testers weren't able to get it working, even with their hacked builds.

Look, I hate making phone calls as much as anyone else, but this technology does give me pause. I use Call Screen in order to filter out spam and nonsense calls all the time, and to some extent, those people deserve to speak to a robot instead of a human. But a blameless receptionist at the local salon? The last thing they need is to talk to Gemini fifteen times a day.

Extending that to talk to your friends and family takes that to another level. While using Gemini can save some time for you, it's going to be bluntly obvious to the person being called that you don't care enough about them to talk to them yourself. Instead, you made them talk to a robot instead.

There are many jokes made about tech billionaires and companies not being real people, and actually being lizards or aliens in disguise, but stuff like this genuinely does make me wonder whether there's some truth in that.

There's no confirmation this feature will ever see the light of day, of course, but it's clear proof Google is working on adding it.