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The customer sent their assistant. Here is how to take the call.

Google is testing a feature in which Gemini phones businesses for the user – booking tables, moving appointments and asking shops to put items aside. It has not reached the Nordics yet. Six steps to be ready when it does.

6 min read

On Thursday 24 September Google began testing "Call for Me", a feature in which Gemini phones businesses on the user's behalf. It can check whether an item is in stock, book a table, move an appointment and ask a shop to put something aside. It works its way through phone menus, waits on hold and introduces itself to whoever answers. The call goes out from the user's own number, and the user can follow it in a live transcript and take over at any point.

For now it is limited to paying Gemini subscribers with a Pixel 11 in the United States, and Google itself has said that real-world conversations are nuanced. But the direction is not Google's alone. The personal assistant Instinct already books tables for its users, and on 23 September CNN described how an American investor had his account on the reservation platform Resy shut down after his assistant tried "hundreds of times every hour". Another user ended up with a table in Tokyo he did not want, carrying a 100 per cent cancellation fee – 200 dollars.

We have written about why the phone rings when the answer is not published anywhere. This time it is about the call itself: what you do when the caller is not the customer, but something the customer has sent. None of this has reached the Nordics yet, which is exactly why it is cheap to prepare for now. Six steps, in the order they should be taken.

1. Write down what you already do with proxy callers

Someone calling on behalf of someone else is nothing new. The daughter moving her father's physiotherapy appointment. The assistant booking a table for the boss. The neighbour asking about a parcel. Most businesses have rules for this, but they are not written anywhere – they live in the head of whoever has been there longest.

An AI assistant makes the unwritten rule impossible to leave unwritten. It asks the same way every time, it calls a lot, and it does not accept "we usually sort that out". So the first step is to write down what a third party is allowed to be told, to book and to change with you today. It takes an hour, and most of what follows builds on it.

2. Sort the requests into four

Who is calling matters less than what they are asking for. Sort what an assistant can ask for into four:

Request Example What has to be in place
Ask Opening hours, price, whether an item is in stock Nothing extra. Answer as you answer everyone.
Book something new A table, an appointment, putting an item aside The name and mobile number of the person it is for, and a confirmation that goes to her
Change or cancel Moving an appointment, cancelling a booking The customer herself has confirmed the change – the same rule as when a person calls for someone else
Information about the customer What the appointment was for, a balance, the details of a case Never without the customer herself being identified

The point of the table is that it does not require you to know whether a machine is calling. The authority the assistant has sits with the customer, and you cannot see it. The category you can see.

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3. Ask instead of guessing

It is tempting to try to recognise a synthetic voice. Don't. You will be wrong in both directions, and it is not what decides anything anyway.

Instead, add one question to the call script, and ask it only when the request is a booking or a change: "Are you calling for yourself, or on behalf of someone?" The answer sends the call to the right row of the table. An assistant that introduces itself has already answered. A person calling for their mother usually will.

One thing does not change: your agent must still say that it is an AI, right from the first sentence, even when the one hearing it is another machine.

4. Answer so it survives being summarised

The customer does not hear the call. She gets a summary afterwards, written by the assistant. Everything you say is boiled down to a few lines – and whatever you said vaguely comes out as a fact.

Say exact values: time, date, price including VAT. One piece of information per sentence. Repeat the most important thing at the end. Avoid "usually", "around" and "that should be fine" – in a summary they turn into promises.

Terms must be said out loud and confirmed explicitly. The Tokyo table with the full cancellation fee is not a story about a stupid assistant. It is a story about a condition that never reached the person it applied to. Your agent should say it plainly – "this booking has a cancellation fee of 30 euros, shall I confirm it?" – and wait for a yes. What the agent says can bind you, and that holds when it is a machine saying yes on the other end too.

5. Send the confirmation to the human

Call for Me calls from the user's own number. That means a text-message confirmation to the number that called lands with the person the booking is for – not with the assistant.

It is the only moment the customer herself sees what was actually agreed. So the confirmation has to make sense without the call: what was booked, when, which terms apply, and how to cancel. "Thanks for calling, see you on Friday" is not a confirmation. It is a greeting.

If the assistant calls from a withheld number or a switchboard, your agent has to ask for a mobile number before it confirms anything at all.

6. Decide how many times the same number may call

An assistant does not get tired. Told to get a table on Friday, it can call again and again until it does. The Resy case happened online, but the pattern moves easily to the phone.

Set a limit: how many calls from the same number within an hour before your agent answers with a fixed message and points to online booking? Put it lower than the lowest of your capacity ceilings, so that you decide what happens when the limit is reached.

Make sure the agent also has a rule for long silence. Two machines each waiting for the other to speak can hold a line open for a long time. After a few seconds your agent should ask once, and then end the call politely.

Test it before it arrives

This can be tried today, without any assistant having called. Ask a colleague to call your own number three times: once to ask about opening hours, once to book on behalf of someone else, and once to move an appointment for someone. Listen for whether the agent tells the three apart, and read the text message that arrives afterwards – as if you had not heard the call.

Someone calling for a customer is still a customer. Just one who cannot hear what you say.

Threll.ai builds voice agents in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. When the assistants arrive, it is the confirmation that decides whether the customer notices you were ready.

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