Who needs a home phone, when you can just ask your digital assistant to place a call for you, for free? That’s the attraction of a new software upgrade just rolled out to Google Home users in the UK – a European first, and surely an early warning sign for European carriers of the value-added communications challenge of digital home speakers to come.

From this week, 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.

Related Company Profiles

View all

‘Speaker recognition’, you ask?

This is the clever bit. Google Home’s artificially intelligent 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.

So, for example, when one user instructs Google to ‘call Mum’, the Assistant will know exactly which ‘Mum’ is meant, because it will recognise the speaker making the request. Likewise, the Google Home product will be able to not only redial last-called numbers, but also recognised those last-placed by individual users within a household.

That all makes the standard home phone look a little dumb in comparison. Problematically, few carriers in the world – let alone European carriers – currently have a good answer to that.

How well do you really know your competitors?

Access the most comprehensive Company Profiles on the market, powered by GlobalData. Save hours of research. Gain competitive edge.

Company Profile – free sample

Thank you!

Your download email will arrive shortly

Not ready to buy yet? Download a free sample

We are confident about the unique quality of our Company Profiles. However, we want you to make the most beneficial decision for your business, so we offer a free sample that you can download by submitting the below form

By GlobalData
Visit our Privacy Policy for more information about our services, how we may use, process and share your personal data, including information of your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications. Our services are intended for corporate subscribers and you warrant that the email address submitted is your corporate email address.

To be clear, Google Home can only place outgoing calls today.

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. But then, given its ability to recognize individual users at this level, it’s questionable whether it will ever need to.

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 Germany and France, as well as further afield in Japan and Australia.

Telephony, of course, is a core component of carriers’ businesses, and still a key feature of carrier fixed service portfolios. For European carriers looking to the converged services household to shore up their future services revenues, the broader competitive challenge is clear.