Google’s Pixel phones are ghost-dialing people and it’s kind of creepy
We’ve probably all been guilty of doing the butt-dial at least once in our lives. It used to be a problem with phones with physical buttons, but not as common with phones with touch screen displays. Phones with touch screen displays now have a new problem – digital assistants making calls for them without their knowledge.
According to a thread on Reddit, Google Pixel users are reporting that their phones are ghost-dialing their contacts. According to the original post:
“It’s the second time my Pixel 6 called someone while it was next to me. For context: another day I wake up at 7am with a call in progress tone. I was so confused I looked at my phone to see who was calling me and to my surprise my phone called a friend that I never called before.”
Some users have checked their Google Assistant history and discovered that the digital assistant was being told to call those contacts, which is weird (and creepy) because some of these users report that this happened while they were asleep, meaning that there was no way they would have activated Google Assistant, at least not knowingly.
Users have found that disabling the “OK Google” hotword detection fixes the problem, but that also means that users won’t have a hands free way of activating Google Assistant. Hopefully Google is aware of the problem and are working on a fix.
Source: XDA Developers