Google's latest Pixel Drop lets Gemini, its AI assistant, make phone calls on your behalf.
A Pixel Drop is Google's bundled software update for Pixel devices, and this one carries four changes. Calling is the headline. The update also brings the Gemini Intelligence suite to the Pixel 10 series, marks the official debut of Google's Pixel Tag, and adds step-by-step workouts to the Pixel Watch.
Google has not said which countries or languages the calling feature supports. It has not said whether it works on phones outside the Pixel 10 series. And it has not said how the person on the other end learns that an AI is calling.
That last gap matters most. Google has been here before. In 2018 it demoed Duplex, an assistant that booked appointments by phone, and the reaction centered less on the technology than on whether people would know they were talking to a machine. Google said at the time that the system would identify itself.
Calls are a harder test for an AI assistant than most tasks it takes on. Drafting an email or summarizing a page affects only the person who asked. A call pulls in a stranger who never agreed to deal with software, and who may hang up on a robotic voice or, worse, not realize it is one.
The disclosure design will decide whether this feels like a convenience or an irritant for the businesses and people on the receiving end. Until Google spells it out, that is the question to put to the feature.