Google is taking another run at a familiar idea: letting AI make some of the everyday phone calls people often avoid. Its new feature, called Ask for Me, is designed to help users book appointments with service providers by having Google's assistant handle the call.
The feature is being tested with nail salons and auto repair shops. A user can ask for a service such as "tire change" or "French manicure," and the AI contacts nearby providers, then returns a summary of prices and available appointments.
What Ask for Me is meant to do
Ask for Me is aimed at routine calls that are useful but time-consuming. These are the calls people make to book appointments, compare prices, or check whether a business can provide a specific service.
Instead of asking the user to call several places directly, the feature lets the user state the service they need. Google's assistant then takes over the contact step and reports back with practical information.
The source article describes a simple flow:
- The user specifies the service they want.
- The AI contacts nearby service providers.
- The system summarizes prices and available appointment times.
That makes the feature part of a broader shift toward agentic AI, where software does not only answer questions but also completes limited tasks on a user's behalf. The source also places Ask for Me alongside concepts such as OpenAI's operator.
Where Google is testing it
For now, Ask for Me is not a broad global rollout. The source says the feature can only be tried in the US and in English.
The current test is also limited by business category. Google is working with nail salons and auto repair shops, two areas where appointment availability and price checks often require direct contact with a provider.
Those examples show why phone-based AI still matters. Many local services do not always expose every price, time slot, or service detail through a clean online booking flow. A phone call remains the bridge between a customer's intent and a business's actual availability.
Why this is not Google's first attempt
The idea behind Ask for Me is not new for Google. In 2018, the company introduced Duplex, an AI system built to book appointments for users.
Duplex drew attention because of how natural it sounded. According to the source article, people on the other end of the line couldn't tell they were talking to AI.
Google later tried the same AI calling technology in several ways. The source mentions restaurant bookings and the automatic collection of business information for Google My Business listings. Even with those experiments, the technology never rolled out widely across countries.
Ask for Me appears to be the latest attempt to make AI calling practical for everyday use. According to Google product manager Rose Yao, the system still runs on Duplex technology.
What businesses may have to handle
The business side of Ask for Me may be just as important as the user side. If the system is calling service providers to ask about prices and appointments, employees may increasingly deal with automated callers during normal operations.
Google says the system identifies itself as automated at the start of each call. That disclosure matters because the earlier Duplex discussion centered partly on how human the system sounded.
Businesses can opt out through their Google Business profile. The source article notes, however, that opting out could become a disadvantage if the technology catches on.
That creates a practical tension. Some businesses may prefer not to receive AI calls, while others may see them as another path to customers who are ready to book. If users begin to expect AI assistants to do the calling, businesses that do not participate may be less visible in that workflow.
Why the timing may be different now
The source article points to two reasons Google may see this as a better moment for another attempt. AI voices have improved in both quality and speed since Duplex first appeared, and running these systems at scale is likely to cost Google less than it did a few years ago.
Those changes matter because AI phone calls depend on more than speech recognition. The system has to understand what the user wants, hold a practical conversation, gather the right details, and return a useful summary. It also has to do this quickly enough to feel worthwhile.
Ask for Me is still narrow: nail salons, auto repair shops, the US, and English. But the direction is clear. Google is trying to move AI from answering questions into handling small, real-world tasks that still depend on phone conversations.
If the test works, the most important result may not be that AI books a "French manicure" or checks a "tire change" price. It may be that users become more comfortable handing off ordinary calls to software, while businesses learn how to respond when the caller is automated from the first sentence.