Phone calls may have fallen out of fashion, but Americans still make 1 billion of them every day. And yet the experience of making a call isn’t all that great: phones don’t always recognize numbers, contacts can be difficult to manage, and they rarely take advantage of newer technologies like Wi-Fi calling.
Facebook introduced a new caller ID-type app – Hello – for Android phones that it said will block unwanted calls and help search for people and places by drawing in data from the social network.
The Hello app also gets the social-networking giant involved in a form of communication from which it’s mostly stayed away – your phone calls.
The app is available on Google Play store for free and replaces the native Android dialer with a significantly more Facebook-centric version, reported The Verge.
Hello seeks to modernise phone calls by allowing users to make free calls over Wi-Fi. The three key features offered by the app are: it uses Facebook to identify callers, even if their contact details are not saved on your smartphone; it makes it easy to block unwanted callers from ringing your phone and it has a robust search feature that allows you to find numbers of local businesses.
The app uses VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol, to make free calls over Wi-Fi. In case you miss a call, Hello will also allow you to respond using Messenger.
Andrea Vaccari, a product manager at the company, said that Facebook had no plans to make money from the app directly.
(With inputs from ANI)