Learn how Take a Message keeps your calls private

You can use Take a Message to respond to your missed and declined calls. A transcription and audio of the caller’s message will appear in the Phone app’s Home tab. Take a Message can also detect spam messages among messages left by missed or declined calls from non-contact numbers. Your phone calls are personal, and that’s why Take a Message uses new, on-device technology to keep your calls private.

Learn where Take a Message is available

You can use Take a Message in:

  • Australia
  • Ireland
  • UK
  • US
  • On all Pixel phones with Android 11 and up

How Take a Message works

Learn how transcripts & recordings are stored on your phone

Important:

  • To protect your privacy, transcripts and recordings are stored on your device.
  • Take a Message processes a missed or declined call only when a user isn’t on the call. If a user joins the call, processing and recording of the caller’s message stops.

Turn off Take a Message

You can turn off Take a Message completely, for example, if you don’t want the call to be processed by Take a Message.

To turn off Take a Message in the Phone app:

  1. Tap More More and then Settings and then Take a Message.
  2. Turn off Take a Message.

Share data with Google to improve Take a Message

After a call is processed, you can choose to share your audio, transcript, and call details from the missed or declined call with Google. We use this information to help improve Take a Message and its spam detection.

You can listen to the audio recording and review the transcript before you decide whether to share your call data with Google.

To help improve machine learning for Take a Message, our support team reviews caller data.

We do:

  • Store your volunteered Take a Message data on Google servers for up to 2 years.

We don’t:

  • Process call data when a user joins the call.
  • Store Take a Message data volunteered by users with identifiers.

If you use Take a Message and choose to share your Take a Message data with Google, you allow Google to access:

  • A recording and transcript of the missed or declined call
  • System logs, like diagnostic data
  • The business’s phone number, for calls from businesses, schools, or other organizations only
  • Greeting and disclosures played on the call
  • A spam verdict from Google for this business’s phone number
  • The timestamps of the general Take a Message events, such as start and end of processing by Take a Message, rounded to the nearest hour

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