We all know the feeling of picking up an unknown call and realizing it’s another insurance company trying to sell a policy. Spam calls, fueled by robocallers in recent years, are downright annoying and take up more time and mental space than they deserve. Google Assistant has an answer to this in the form of Call Screening, an exclusive feature for Pixel devices. It picks up the call on your behalf to ask the person on the other end why they’re calling and prevents almost all spam calls from bothering you.
The feature doesn’t need a Wi-Fi or mobile connection and works on-device. It does more than block calls that are a part of Google’s scam database. If it’s a robocall, it automatically hangs up the call without letting the phone ring. However, if there’s a human on the other end, it asks them to explain the reason for calling and shows you a transcript of their response. Depending on the response, you can make Google Assistant either ask further questions like “Is it urgent?” or tell them that you’ll call later. If you figure it’s not a spam call, you can choose to pick up the call and continue the conversation.
There’s more to call screening than blocking spam calls, though, and we’ll dive into the details below.
Which Google Pixel phones work with Call Screening?
There are several perks to getting a Google Pixel, and Call Screening is one of them. Yes, it’s exclusive to smartphones made by Google at the time of writing—from the OG Pixel to the Pixel 6 Pro and the Pixel 6a. However, certain settings might not be available on older models.
While all Pixels support the feature, Google has rolled out the Call Screening feature in a handful of countries, and it’s currently available in the following:
- Australia
- Canada
- France
- Germany
- Ireland
- Italy
- Japan
- Spain
- U.K.
- U.S.
How to use Call Screening and customize it for your needs
Call screening is primarily aimed at spam calls and robocallers, but its usefulness extends beyond that. It’s also a handy way to deal with calls from unknown numbers when you’re in situations where you can’t pick up the call, say when you’re in a meeting or a lecture.
Instead of missing the call, you can manually screen the call—it appears as a third option alongside Answer and Decline—and read the transcription to know who is calling and why. If the call is legitimate, you can get Google Assistant to talk on your behalf by choosing from a few on-screen prompts such as “I’ll call you back” or “Tell me more.” The transcript and audio of all spam calls are saved locally on your device, and you can access them later from the call logs in the Phone app.
Call screening offers a few settings that give you a certain degree of control over how Assistant handles unknown calls. Here’s how you can access them:
- Open the Google Phone app and tap the three dots in the upper-right corner.
- Tap Settings and go to the Spam and Call Screen menu option.
- Open Call Screen to access the settings.
Here, you can tweak a bunch of settings to customize the experience to your needs and ensure that you aren’t missing any important calls. Google doesn’t screen calls from contacts saved on your phone, so rest assured that those contacts won’t face any delays or annoying messages when they call you. Coming back to the settings, here’s all that you can play around with:
- Save Call Screen audio: If you want to save the audio of all the calls that are answered by Assistant, turn on this setting. All saved audio recordings can be accessed from within the Phone app’s call logs.
- Choose which calls to screen: Not all unknown calls are the same. While some can be spam calls, some can be from new connections whose numbers you haven’t saved yet. Google acknowledges this and lets you choose which kinds of calls to screen. It splits unknown calls into four categories—Spam, Possibly faked numbers, First-time callers, and Private or hidden.
If you don’t want to use automatic call screening on a category of calls, choose Ring phone (default). Even when you disable automatic screening, you can still manually screen an unknown incoming call by choosing the Screen Call option.
- Change Assistant voice: Google offers an option to choose between two voices that you can sample. The choice isn’t elaborate, but if you care whether a masculine or a feminine voice represents you on calls, you have control over that.
More Google Pixel tip and tricks that make your phone magical
Google Call screening is an effective way to deal with spam calls and, since its inception in 2018, has only become better at identifying spam and robocallers. This isn’t the only trick that Assistant on the Pixel has up its sleeve, though. It can also hold calls for you, check call wait times, and navigate slow-moving audio menus.
Now that you’re up to speed on how to screen calls on your Pixel, you might want to learn how to set up emergency SOS features on your Android or supercharge your Google Calendar experience.
