Google Home Now Makes Free Calls in the UK

You can now ask your digital assistant to place a call for you, for free? A new software upgrade just rolled out to Google Home users in the UK.

The users of Google’s flagship digital home speaker product will now be able to ask their Google Assistant to call any normal-rate fixed or mobile UK number, by voice command, and entirely free of charge. What’s more, Google Home can search for and call UK businesses by name, all with natural voice speaker recognition.

Google Home’s Assistant is able to recognize the user from his or her voice pattern, and will use this context to find friends and other contacts from the user’s personal Google Contacts phone list.

For example, when one user instructs Google to ‘call the Queen’, the Assistant will know exactly which ‘Queen’ is meant, because it will recognize the speaker making the request.

The Google Home product will be able to not only redial last-called numbers, but also recognized those last-placed by individual users within a household.

Currently, Google Home can only place outgoing calls, the calls will display with the caller’s individual mobile phone, and returning calls will therefore be placed back to the user’s mobile phone. In other words, Google Home can’t handle incoming calls.

For now, free outbound calling is only available to Google Home’s UK users. But Google’s ambitions are always global; it’s inevitable that this upgrade will be rolled out to further European markets in the coming months. Google Home has already been launched in United States , Canada, Germany, France, Japan and Australia.