Google is rolling out a new AI powered business calling feature.
There's some controversy from the past, but also a really interesting new way to get info from businesses without actually having to call them yourself.
You send Google and their AI agent to do that.
This is rolling out to users in the United States, and there's a whole bunch of really interesting features that are coming, that are shipping with this essentially.
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All right, let's get into what Google has rolled out here in what people are calling a pretty big update as far as making something useful that people actually use.
So they're calling this an agentic AI powered business caller.
The thing about it is like, I don't know if I've necessarily called this agentic, like it, I guess it accomplished the task for it does a call, but it's just it's asking very basically a question.
And then it's kind of like hanging up it's it's a workflow.
It doesn't it's not really thinking or doing too much other than that.
So So I don't know if we want to call this an agent yet, but people have different definitions of agents.
In any case, this is rolling out to users in the U .S. They've actually been testing this since January, but you had to be, you kind of had to opt in on their AI labs platform or whatever.
So to actually be able to test this, but now everyone is going to be able to use this.
it's using Gemini 2 .5 Pro, so this is their best AI model to do the, you know, the LLM and kind of reasoning element of this.
And then they're using their own voice model.
So they, a couple years ago, they had some sort of tool that was similar, and it got a lot of criticism, it definitely wasn't as good as what they're rolling out now.
But the thing that people didn't like is there were, you know, businesses or people were just thinking that they were talking to an actual human.
So So they've they've said, OK, we're going to identify ourselves as an actual bot when we call.
So the way this essentially works is you'll be able to go to something like Google Search or, you know, or like Google Maps, find a business that you're interested in contacting.
So if it was like a pet groomer, you'd click on the groomer and then you're going to be able to fill out a bunch of information.
So essentially, you get a pick that you want to, you want to, you know, it's quote unquote, it says, have AI check pricing or whatever.
So you get the AI initiated.
It's going to ask you some questions, right?
So you're going to say, like, what services are you specifically interested in?
When are you looking to do this?
You can say as soon as possible.
What's your contact details?
You can put your email and phone number in there.
And then, you know, what city are you based out of?
You put your city. Okay.
So you hit submit. it, the AI will then go and call the business and says, I think before it actually makes a call, it's going to say, hey, I am an AI from Google calling on behalf of a user to get some information about your business.
And then we'll say, you know, like, hey, I'm the user.
You know, Elsa is interested in a nail trimming service, and she's interested in doing it as soon as possible.
accessible, she's based here in the city, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you know, asks what their info is.
Once they get that back to you, Google will send you the information.
So now you have, you know, what the pricing is.
And this is super useful, in my opinion.
And because essentially, like, if I was interested in getting the pricing from like, I don't know, I wanted to shop around to get the pricing on like a pet grooming package from a bunch of different companies.
And you know, you call them all up and talk to them all and get sucked into a conversation with five different from people just to compare pricing, this seems like a really fast way to do it.
But I think from the business side, maybe they don't like it as much because I'm thinking for myself, you know, I own a podcast studio in Arizona that I have used to run my podcast for a long time.
And at this point, it's just a local business that my studio manager, he runs that for me because I've moved to the other side of the country.
But, you know, answering phone calls like that, a lot of of times local businesses like to kind of like, you know, ask them about their pet or ask about their, you know, whatever they're calling about and get more information and try to like build rapport so that they're going to, you know, use them and book with them.
And so I think a lot of local businesses will feel maybe a little bit annoyed just giving the information to an AI who it knows is just going to shop around at like five to 10 different businesses and then just deliver the lowest price.
And you don't always get to sell yourself or your extra features or extra extra service, you know, like, and I'm sure we've all experienced this talking to people.
So maybe it's maybe it's annoying.
I don't know. I'm just trying to think from a local business perspective.
But, you know, a lot of times when someone's like, hey, like, I want to get a dog grooming package, like, okay, well, you got to make sure that like the shampoo you use on the dog is like eco friendly, and it's going to be, you know, good for their skin and blah, blah, blah, we always use that kind of shampoo, blah, blah, right?
Like you can find some element and talk up about why you're the highest quality and maybe not the lowest price.
Meanwhile, you might call the next guy and he's like, yep, we get you in like in 10 minutes and we'll get it done really quick, blah, blah, blah, but he's using like lower quality products.
I don't know, this is just a theoretical example, right?
So when you make those calls, you kind of want to sell yourself and I think people will be annoyed if an AI is literally just asking them what's the bottom line price.
And so users will like it if they're really price conscious, but you may not always get the best quality and you might not know, maybe not quality, but you might not know about that extra information.
maybe you don't even know what question you should be asking when you're calling a roofer about some sort of roofing.
You didn't get to find out that there's, you know, this cheap shingle, and there's an expensive shingle.
And you know, the expensive ones are way higher quality.
And so now you're going to go with the cheapest quote you got out of five roofers, but it's going to be the lowest quality thing.
So is there's like definitely some pros and cons here?
Is it useful? Yes, I would definitely say it's useful.
But sometimes like when you're doing the research, and you're calling these companies, you're getting more information than just what I feel like an AI model is going to extract out of them.
You'll, you might learn a little bit more.
Maybe you learn that there's different qualities of material.
And then when you call your next person and you're still asking for quotes, you ask, you know, what, you know, level of asphalt is on the shingle and, uh, you know, what the, how many years it's rated for, and then you find out it's less and then you're going to go with the original one, even if it's a little bit more money.
I don't know. Right.
So, so this is the, this is the, the things that I think about when it comes to this.
In any case, this should be a very interesting tool.
I'm excited for it to be launched.
I would definitely use it.
I see some serious value in it.
In addition to this, Google's also doing a whole bunch of updates to their AI mode where you're actually able to ask questions.
They have a deeper research and they're adding Gemini 2 .5 pro to power the new AI mode.
So it's essentially a competitor to perplexity.
They don't really want to completely replace a Google search. So they just made something called AI mode, which is basically, you know, competing with chat GPT search and perplexity.
So a whole bunch of new things rolling out from Google.
It's definitely definitely going to increase adoption of AI.
I'm excited to see how it goes.
It's interesting to see Google get into automated voice calling.
This is obviously a very interesting industry.
So it'll be interesting to see how Google actually rolls this out, if people find this useful or if they feel like they're missing different data points when talking to companies like I kind of talked about.
In any case, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. I hope that this was useful.
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Thanks so much for tuning in and I will catch you in the next episode.
