Google is bringing some crazy new AI-powered experiences to its Pixel devices. The company is launching two new features for the Pixel devices this year: Screen Call, and Google Duplex.

Google Duplex is an Assistant-powered feature that lets Assistant take care of your real-world tasks. Google first demoed the feature back at I/O 2018, and it’s finally making its way to users later this year, With Duplex, Assistant can, for example, call a restaurant to book a table or call a hair salon to book your appointment, all while sounding natural like a real human thanks to AI. The feature is finally launching in the United States, starting with Pixel devices for users in New York, Atlanta, Phoenix, and San Francisco Bay Area. It will only help users with booking restaurant reservations to begin with later this year and come to other parts of the US in the future.

And then there’s the new Screen Call feature. This feature uses the Pixel 3‘s on-device AI to tackle spam calls. Screen call will essentially allow you to find out who’s calling you and why, without even having to actually pick up the call. Google Assistant will take care of all of that, and it will provide you with a real-time transcription of the call as it happens. From there, you can take further actions on the call, like reporting it as spam or picking up the call yourself. It’s really smart. The feature is only available for Pixel 3 users in the US, though.

Google’s new Assistant-powered features are really quite interesting and risky, so Google is being very careful about the rollout here. When the company first introduced Duplex, it got a lot of questions surrounding privacy. Plus, this is all AI-powered, so things could go terribly wrong at times. And it makes perfect sense for Google to take things slow here.

Tagged with Google Duplex, Pixel 3, Screen Call