Google has a help page for businesses that describes something worth reading slowly: the search engine can call a business on a customer's behalf. It can book an appointment, check the wait time for a table, and confirm the price and availability of a product. The calls are monitored and recorded. For now the feature is only available in the United States, and not in Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana or Nebraska.
But the interesting part of the page is not that Google calls. It is when it doesn't:
“If you've already shared your in-store product details via Google Merchant Center, Google will use that information and will not call your business to ask about inventory.”
Share the product data and it doesn't dial. Booking is described the same way: if a booking partner exists, Google goes through it – otherwise it picks up the phone.
The call is the fallback
Machine-readable first, voice second. That makes the call something other than a feature. It is a detour around data that doesn't exist.
And it inverts a number most organisations treat as a given. Part of inbound volume is not demand – it is questions someone had to ask out loud because the answer wasn't published anywhere. Opening hours, stock status, what a service costs. These are the simplest questions a business gets, and the most expensive to answer one at a time. It is the same distinction as between calls that were answered and cases that were resolved: the count says nothing about why they rang.
The caller doesn't behave like a customer
An agent calling on a customer's behalf has no patience to lose and no reluctance to call your competitor next. By Google's own description, the customer receives the answer by email or text – which is to say, alongside what everyone else said.
So “let me check and call you back” no longer works. It isn't an answer, it's a dropped enquiry. And that holds whether the one answering is a person or an agent set up to answer every time.
It also opens a question nobody has a tidy answer to yet. The duty to disclose that you are AI was written for a machine talking to a person. Here it is talking to a machine, on behalf of a person who isn't listening.
The ordering is worth noting now
The feature is live across most of the United States and nowhere in Europe yet. Either way, the ordering Google has chosen costs nothing to account for in advance and a great deal to catch up on afterwards: publish what can be published, and make sure that what has to be said out loud is said by someone who answers every time.
Threll.ai builds voice agents in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. The best call is still the one that gets answered. The second best is the one that never needed to happen.
