Facebook’s “Hello” app is a social media caller ID and phone dialer
Last month, news leaked that Facebook might be working on a new phone dialer app, and now it looks like those rumors were true. Facebook has announced a new product called Hello, a caller ID and dialer app made by the Messenger team that pulls in Facebook profiles for phone numbers.
“Billions of calls are made every day on mobile phones, and people often have very little information about who’s calling them,” Facebook Product Manager Andrea Vaccari wrote in the announcement. “When you get a call, Hello will show you info about who’s calling you, even if you don’t have that number saved in your phone. You will only see info that people have already shared with you on Facebook.”
Caller ID and call block
The caller ID feature makes it easy to connect your friends’ Facebook profiles with their phone numbers, but it also makes it easier to see information about businesses whose numbers are made public.
According to Vaccari, Hello will also allow users to easily screen calls based on data from Facebook, and they will even be able to block unwanted calls. Blocked calls will still go to your phone, but they will be less obtrusive.
“From your settings, you can block specific numbers and adjust whether you want to automatically blocks calls from commonly blocked numbers,” Vaccari wrote. “Blocked calls go straight to voicemail and can be reviewed in your recent calls.”
“Commonly blocked numbers” likely refers to marketing or sales calls, although it could also include any number that calls a significant number of people, such as collections agencies, political surveys and so on.
Other Hello functions
Aside from caller ID, Hello also functions as a contacts list, a phone book for numbers that have been made public and a dialer replacement. Unlike Facebook Messenger, which can make calls using a Wi-Fi connection, calls made using Hello still require a voice plan.
Hello is yet another product to come out of the Facebook Creative Labs program, which allows internal Facebook teams to work on projects that do not necessarily fit in with the core Facebook app. Other apps that have come out of Creative Labs include Paper, Rooms, Riff and others.
Hello is currently available for Android only, and you can now download it on Play Store.
Image credit: Facebook
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