I let Google's Call Assistant handle my phone for a week to see if any real callers got through

"I don't like spam callers" might be the coldest, most uncontroversial take of all time, but it was heavy on my mind a few weeks ago.

I'd long since stopped spam from taking over my inbox, but my phone was a different story. The AI boom has brought in a flood of robocallers, and I was getting hounded by supposed affiliate marketers and a rotating cast of unknown numbers.

So I decided to deal with it and test something at the same time.

Google Pixel's Call Screen had been on my list to vet for a while, and turning it all the way up seemed like the fastest way to find out if it actually worked.

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How Call Screen actually works

There are levels to this, literally

Call Screen is easy to set up and runs on three protection levels called Basic, Medium, and Maximum.

Basic declines numbers Google already knows are spam. Medium does that and also screens anything flagged as suspicious, a label I always found vague. Maximum declines spam and screens every call from a number that isn't in your contacts.

That top level is where the real potential lies. When a call is screened, the caller hears that you're using a screening service and is prompted for a name and a reason for the call.

This, in theory, instantly defeats robocallers who have nothing useful to say to that prompt. Most scam callers are screened as well, since they're not incentivized to spend time talking to bots. If someone does try to push through, the feature ends the call for you.

All of this happens before your phone rings, so screened spam never reaches you at all. There's also a live transcript feature so you can track the screening process and let legitimate first-time callers off the hook faster.

My worry going in was that the maximum level would turn away regular callers who didn't want to deal with a robot. So I set my Pixel to Maximum and committed to a week of testing.

How it performed against spam

The part I was hoping for

With Maximum protection turned on, it didn't take long for me to start seeing how it handled spam calls, and I was pleasantly surprised.

By the end of the first afternoon, it had already declined one confirmed spam number and cut off a robocaller two sentences into its pitch. I started logging the interactions because I couldn't believe the hit rate.

Some spammers fumbled for a few seconds before giving up, and others hung up the moment the screen asked them anything. There was no ringing, missed-call notifications, or anything for me to do, really.

I think the feature might be making my spam problem worse over time by confirming my number is live every time it answers. That would matter more if I ever had to actually deal with the calls, but I don't, so it doesn't.

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Call Screen versus real callers

False positives and bad incentives

The question I cared about most was whether the screen would scare off genuine first-time callers.

I could imagine someone impatient, in a hurry, or wary of talking to AI, just dropping the call and trying to reach me another way. A week of Maximum would tell me how often that happened.

In practice, it actually wasn't an issue. Most professionals who called complied within a few seconds, and while a handful of unknown numbers hung up instantly, I didn't miss a single appointment or business call I was expecting.

I was happy with that, though I could see someone in a different line of work getting a less desirable result. If your job depends on cold calls from numbers you've never saved, Maximum would cost you more than it costs me.

Call Notes gets extra credit

The feature I wasn't looking for

Using Call Screen is how I stumbled into Call Notes, which uses Gemini Nano to transcribe my calls and summarize the longer ones.

It opens with an audible notification, so both parties know that the recording has started, then works quietly in the background. I ran it on every call that got through the screen, and it held up every time.

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Call Notes stores and processes everything on-device, so the recordings stay on my phone rather than going to a cloud server somewhere. Given how Google has decided to be the bane of all consumer privacy, local processing surprised me in a good way.

My only real fear was what this would do to my shrinking storage, but Call Notes lets me set auto-delete windows anywhere from seven days to a month.

It's a bit odd that I don't get the option to automatically engage Call Notes on every call. I have to trigger it by hand each time, but it's a tiny inconvenience for a very useful feature. At least, I can automatically turn it on for unknown contacts.

How I plan to use Call Screen

When this first landed on Pixel, I didn't trust it to do what it promised, so I put it on the back burner until I couldn't stand the spam anymore.

A week in, Call Screen does exactly what it claims and does it well. The only real drawback, the occasional friction with humans who won't talk to the screen, doesn't affect me as much, because saving a number before an expected call is trivial in my line of work.

Call Screen can't stop spammers from targeting my number, since nothing really can, but with Maximum left on, I no longer have to deal with any of them. And if I'm being honest, it's a little satisfying to look through a week's worth of blocked calls stacked up in the log.