While Congress grills Silicon Valley’s most lifeless Jello Jiggler today, the folks over at 9to5Google noticed that Google’s dialer app for Pixel and other stock Android phones has been upgraded with the ability to send spam calls straight to voicemail.
The added functionality is an improvement to the Phone app’s existing spam call protection, which turns the screen red and alerts users anytime the phone detects an incoming spam or robocall. But for those who opt into the Phone app beta program, the new feature won’t even bother ringing your handset at all, and instead will immediately forward the spam call to voicemail.
A nice bonus to the feature is that when a spam call does get rejected and redirected to voicemail, the phone won’t even display that you have any missed calls. Assuming the feature works as advertised, this means there’ll be a lot less of a need to worry about random numbers showing up in your notifications. However, the Phone app will still save any messages in your voicemail’s inbox, which means you’ll have to go in and manually delete them yourself later.
As a beta product, there’s bound to be a few bugs or issues with the app, so don’t be surprised if you download it and it mistakenly blocks your weekly phone call with Nana. But after those kinks are ironed out, the feature should make its way over to the official version of the app sometime in the next few weeks.