There are plenty of new AI features coming to the Google Pixel 9 soon, but one of the most intriguing (to me anyway) is the Call Notes feature. Call Notes is designed to listen to your phone calls, summarizing all the main points of discussion and offering a full transcript of the conversation. That way, you always know what was said and what details were agreed upon.
Call Notes hasn't been released to the public yet, but Android sleuth AssembleDebug managed to get a preview version of Call Notes running on his own device. This preview version has all the basic features you'd expect from a feature like this, including an on/off button. But Android Police noticed that there seems to be a catch: Call Notes apparently can't be enabled for calls with existing contacts.
At first glance, this preview version of Call Notes will only automatically activate when calling uncontacted people. There appear to be four proposed settings to activate Call Notes for every uncontacted call, for incoming uncontacted calls, for outgoing uncontacted calls, and never.
This suggests that the only way to enable call notes when talking to saved contacts is to manually enable it, which would be pretty complicated. You'd think there would be more configuration options for the numbers you have saved on your phone, like the option to set call notes to turn on for some contacts and not others. Like your super-peculiar cousin who never remembers where he's supposed to be or when.
We don't yet know which countries or languages will support Call Notes, and Google has been rather vague on this particular point, only confirming that it won't be available everywhere, or in all languages. However, the good news is that AssembleDebug doesn't typically use Pixel devices to test apps, so the fact that they were able to run a version of Call Notes means that this feature may not always be a Pixel 9 exclusive.
As for which devices might support Call Notes, that's unclear. Given that the goal of Call Notes is for everything to run on-device (for privacy reasons), it's likely that any phone that can't run Gemini Nano will be excluded. While this doesn't guarantee that every phone capable of running Google's on-device AI software will be eligible, since the Pixel 8 series supports Gemini Nano, it's possible that Google will at least bring the feature to those phones.
Google hasn’t confirmed whether Call Notes will be a feature available on the Pixel 9’s release day, or if it’ll arrive as part of a future feature. The vagueness surrounding some of its terms certainly doesn’t bode well for a release in the immediate future. Still, we won’t know for sure until the Pixel 9 actually releases later this week. In the meantime, all we can do is be patient and wait.
In the meantime, be sure to check out our Pixel 9 hands-on review, our Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL hands-on review, and our Pixel 9 Pro Fold hands-on review for our first impressions of all four new Pixel phones.