TL;DR
- An Android Authority teardown has revealed that Google’s Phone app could let you switch to audio tones when using Call Notes.
- The Call Notes feature currently plays an audio-based disclaimer to let people know they’re being recorded.
- Chimes would be far more subtle than a full-blown audio disclaimer to callers.
Google’s Phone app for Pixel phones gained a helpful Call Notes feature last year, which records, transcribes, and summarizes specific calls for your convenience. It now looks like the company could bring a subtle but welcome option to Call Notes as well.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We conducted a teardown of the Phone by Google app (version 178.0.765584175-publicbeta-pixel2024) and found a Play audio tone instead of disclaimer toggle in the Call Notes menu. Check out the screenshot below.
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
When you currently use the Call Notes feature in the Google Phone app, it plays an audio disclaimer warning both parties that the call is being recorded. So this toggle would change that disclaimer to a short beep. The updated app also contains two audio files, which might be the starting and ending beeps. You can listen to the respective beeps below.
In any event, playing a tone for Call Notes would be a welcome time-saver over using the full disclaimer. This would be particularly useful if you frequently transcribe and summarize phone calls. However, the chime could also be less than ideal as it doesn’t outright say that the call is being recorded.
This news also follows our recent discovery that the Phone app could gain the ability to automatically delete call notes. Our own sleuthing suggests that these notes can be automatically deleted after a week, two weeks, or 30 days.
Google isn’t the only Android phone brand offering call summaries and transcriptions, though. Samsung also offers these capabilities as part of its Galaxy AI suite of features. Nevertheless, we’re glad to see Pixels gaining more options in this regard.
