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Comment by IE6 | Hacker News Reader

Completely anecdotal and tangential but: the feature of the google pixel 6 where it screens my calls for me and offers up its own robo-voice interactive answering service is absolutely amazing. The phone visually shows a transcript of what is being said, what their response is (if any), and allows me to click options to respond. The main advantage is of the majority spam calls I get in a day I've already been able to "rescue" a few legitimate calls that I needed to respond to.

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That sounds like some pretty cool tech, but the problem is that spam still interrupts your day, whether you're holding the phone to your ear or looking at it in front of your face.

The feature auto-screens and only alerts you if the caller is deemed important. Most of them just hang up and there's no interruption at all.

Yeah - the config is somewhat granular so for known spam I don't even see it happening.

I agree. Waiting for the robot to interrogate the auto-recorded spam call is significantly more annoying than just picking up the phone, hearing a sales pitch in Spanish or the "your car warranty is about to expire" man, and immediately hanging up.

I like this feature too. Somewhat unrelated, I saw a similar "hold-for-me" frill released on my Pixel recently and used it a few times. Later read that ToS and saw that Google records the entirety of your conversation- not just the part that you have them hold- when you use this feature. Wouldn't be surprised if there were something like this on the screen-feature for the calls you end up picking up. For me it's been about 2/200.

I think there are plenty of legitimate callers who will just hang up if they get the robo screener. "Must have been a wrong number." "Weird, I got the operator." "I'm not dealing with this."

That's fair - I've found the opposite: all this does is effectively push up the voicemail service to a layer I can interact with (as opposed to google voice voicemail) and usually important calls will attempt to interract with the robo screener or leave a message whereas spam will just ignore the robo screener entirely. This is purely my personal experience though and depending on how you use your phone (like in a business setting) and with who (like people who are legitimately busy) you may experience the complete opposite experience.

Are there plenty compared with to volume of spam? I have been using this service for a while, and check up on what its doing, and so far everything its filtered has been an unwanted call.

Plenty meaning enough to affect your day when it happens, and likely enough to happen at some point in a normal life.

If it's important they will leave a message or contact you a different way. No loss for me.

My post very deliberately meant to disagree with that. Hanging up is mutually exclusive with leaving a message. Important to you is unfortunately not the same as important to the caller. A car mechanic or doctor's office might make very little effort to contact you another way, and might wait hours or a day before even attempting to do so. And we have delivery drivers known for giving up on delivering your stuff even in ideal circumstances.

My experience has been entirely positive. Every dentist, day care, plumber, doctor, car mechanic, etc whose call I was expecting has said a terse reason for calling like "Doctor So-and-so" or "X car mechanic your car is ready" or "day care please call". Of course I have no data for calls I wasn't expecting, but given that any call I am not expecting is usually a call to action to do business with them "hey, your car has X thousand miles, come for an oil change" or "your cleaning is coming up next week" or something like that.

Basically, if I am expecting the call, I 100% get them. If I am not expecting the call, I got a lot of them or they use another method like text or email. I am not aware of any calls I am not expecting that I missed out on, but my fear of missing out unsolicited calls is pretty low. And I trust that for unsolicited calls, they are more about getting through than I care about getting through.

that seems amazing but it should never have to exist.

Robo callers talking to Robo callers is not the future we want to live in.

Quick, pick which amoral technofeudal lord you want to serve.

right but I have no control over one aspect (spam calls existing) but I do have control over the other aspect (interruption to my personal workflow due to spam calls) - not everything has to be perfect in all aspects - always expecting so must be extremely exhausting ...

I agree, except that this is the logic of a prisoner.

"I cannot vote or express myself in my country, so this what I do to cope"

Ok, if you were me what would you do differently? I wish to be enlightened ...

Demand legislation to end spam calls, along with everyone else, and it would end. At minimum tell your carrier about it. Their customer service takes notes. If everyone started calling about it, it would stop quickly.

Ok - I will shoulder that burden and disable my google feature on my phone - thanks for the help!

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