The company is letting Pixel 6 users know through the Phone app’s support page that the Hold For Me and Call Screening features are disabled on their devices. This applies to the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro running on the SQ1D build. “In light of a bug in the December Android update, we are disabling Hold For Me and Call Screening on Pixel 6 devices running on Android S December QPR release (e.g. SQ1D.211205.016.A4) until we fix the underlying problems. Thanks to those of you who reported this issue,” Google said on its support page.
Hold For Me on the Pixel 6 enables Google Assistant to go through pre-recorded calls
This basically removes two of the key features from the new Pixel smartphones. In case you didn’t know, Call Screening lets users screen incoming calls while Hold For Me lets Google Assistant take over the call to determine whether the person on the other end is real or if it’s just a recording. Droid-Life points out that most Pixel 6 owners in the U.S. haven’t received the December OTA update yet. It is only accessible for customers who are willing to sideload it onto their devices. So if you’re one of the users who manually installed the December update, Call Screening and Hold For Me likely don’t exist anymore. “Our teams are actively working on resolving this issue. We will provide any updates on this post as they become available. We recommend Subscribing to this community post to be directly notified with an email update on the status of this issue,” the support page says. While that explains a fair bit, we still don’t know what’s causing this issue. In any case, we’ll keep an ear to the ground for more details on this bug. It’s safe to say that the past couple of months has been far from perfect for Google and its latest Pixel phones.
