alexr_rwx | Google Assistant success story

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- I hear my phone ringing quietly. Find it. Try to pick up. Can't pick up, but it's still ringing (turns out my phone was dialing out)

- Turns out it was dialing my friend who I haven't talked to in a few years! He picks up, somewhat surprised. We catch up and chat for like 70 minutes.

- I go back and look at the Assistant log, and it thought I had said "Call Slate"; I'm not sure what I said that sounded like that, but it dutifully started calling my buddy Corey Slate.

So like... nice! <3

Maybe Google Assistant team should consider causing more serendipitous accidental calls between old friends?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

chrisamaphone

aww wow this is a sweet story <3

From:

lindseykuper

This went well, but it could've gone badly! I have people in my contact list that I really don't particularly want to talk to. (Maybe I should remove them, I guess?)

Anyway, I remember someone saying that they had a spreadsheet to keep track of when the last time was that they had contacted all their friends, and they could sort by date to see who they hadn't hung out with in a while, to make sure they hung out with that person. You could imagine having some automation that works together with something like that. Automated "hey, you haven't called so-and-so in a while; how about now?" reminders or whatever.

From:

brainwane

I agree with everything you said. I wonder whether this sort of thing would be easy to add to Shauna Gordon-McKeon's Smalltalk app.

I figure a contact list is partly for *knowing who is calling* even if they're people I rarely want to initiate contact with....

From:

lindseykuper

> I figure a contact list is partly for *knowing who is calling* even if they're people I rarely want to initiate contact with....

Right, yeah. Maybe it would be useful to have a per-contact "OK to auto-call this person" setting.

Actually, this made me wonder if that feature already exists in the Google Contacts app on my phone. It doesn't appear to, but in the process of looking for it I discovered that there is an optional field for specifying your relationship with someone, which includes options like "Spouse". What's the use case for a "Spouse" label? And then that made me think that there really ought to be a category for "person to contact if this phone is found"...