Google Voice Starts Labeling Spam Calls

Google Voice is one of those services from Google that you never quite stop worrying about. It’s a Google product that is incredibly important to so many of us, yet Google often neglects it for lengthy periods of time, leaving us wondering if it is on the verge of receiving a major update or about to hit the Google product graveyard.

For this final week of the year, Google is giving Google Voice a much-needed new feature, so for now we can assume it’ll live on.

The big new feature is spam call labeling. Yes, this is a feature that probably should have been here a long, long time ago and is the perfect example of Google randomly showing us they care about Voice. This is a calling app, after all, and here we are days away from 2023 only now getting spam call labeling of incoming calls.

I’m not complaining! OK, I am a little, but also nodding in acceptance of this basic calling feature that I will truly now appreciate.

Google detailed the new feature to Workspace customers, noting that it uses “the same advanced artificial intelligence that identifies billions of spam calls each month across Google’s calling ecosystem.” Love that.

The setting for it can be found in Settings>Security within the Voice app. In that section of the app, there is an option for “Filter spam.” Weirdly, you have to toggle that setting OFF in order for incoming calls to get a “Suspected spam caller” label. The reason is because that setting turned to ON will automatically filter a call like that and send it to voicemail.

I can tell you that I have the setting and am on version 2022.11.28.491470536. I haven’t received an update to Google Voice in a couple of weeks, so this could simple be a back-end change from Google.

Google Play Link: Google Voice