AI Assistants Are Starting to Call Your Business by Phone

Google has started testing a feature that lets its Gemini assistant place phone calls to local businesses for the user. As reported by The Verge, the assistant dials, introduces itself, works through automated menus, waits on hold and talks to whoever picks up. For a restaurant, clinic or repair shop, that means some of the voices on your line will soon belong to software acting for a customer, not to the customer.

What actually changed

Google launched what it calls an early experiment on the Pixel 11. A user can tell Gemini in the app to call a business instead of dialing themselves. The examples Google gives are ordinary front-desk requests: booking a table, asking whether an item is in stock, moving an appointment.

The user is not cut out of the loop. They see a live transcript of the call and can take over the conversation at any moment. That is the main difference from the earlier "Call for me" feature Google announced last year, which could ring local businesses to ask about a product but gave the user no way to step in.

The rollout is narrow for now: an early preview for paying Gemini subscribers who are enrolled in the Phone by Google public beta, on Pixel 11, in the US. Google is not the only one moving in this direction. The Verge notes that Meta is working on a comparable automated calling feature for its Muse agent, though those calls may reportedly involve a human behind the scenes.

Why it matters for a small business

One detail deserves your attention: the assistant waits on hold. A human customer with a two-minute wait hangs up and calls a competitor. A machine does not get bored. That quietly shifts the cost of a bad phone experience — you will stop losing those callers to impatience, and start losing them for other reasons.

Those other reasons are worth listing. Phone menus that loop. Staff who answer with an unclear greeting so the caller cannot tell whether they reached the right place. Answers like "let me check and call you back," which do not work when the person on the other end is software running one task. Prices or availability that only one employee knows.

There is also a trust question. Your staff will start receiving calls where the voice says it is an assistant calling for someone else. If nobody has told them this exists, the natural reaction is to assume spam and hang up. That is a real booking lost, from a real customer who was sitting right there watching the transcript.

This is not only a US story. The feature is limited to one phone in one market today, but assistant-placed calls are being built by more than one large company. Any business that takes bookings or stock questions by phone will meet them eventually.

What to do about it

• Call your own number from the outside, as a customer would. Time how long it takes to reach a person and to get a yes-or-no answer about availability. Anything that loops or dead-ends is now a direct revenue leak.
• Brief the front desk that a caller may announce itself as an AI assistant acting for a customer. The instruction is simple: treat it as a real request from a real person, confirm details out loud, and repeat the final booking back clearly so it lands correctly in the transcript.
• Write short scripts for your three or four most common calls — reserve, reschedule, is it in stock, what does it cost. Short, literal sentences work better than conversational filler for both humans and machines.
• Make the same information answerable without a call. Current opening hours, address, prices and a working online booking form on your own site mean many of these requests never need to occupy the phone at all.
• Keep stock and appointment data in one place your staff can actually check while on the line. "I will find out and ring you back" is the weakest possible answer to an assistant-placed call.

Nothing here is exotic. Every item on that list also improves the experience for human callers, which is the point: an assistant calling on someone's behalf is just a customer with no patience for confusion and infinite patience for hold music. The businesses that answer clearly, confirm precisely and publish their basic facts online will convert those calls. The ones running on tribal knowledge and a receptionist's memory will not, and they will not even hear the complaint.