I'D LOVE TO HEAR FROM THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE TRIED OUT THE HOLD ASSIST FEATURE. I KNOW THIS ISN'T SUPER SUPER NEW -- IT CAME WITH IOS 26 two months ago -- but I have yet to use it.
My main concern with it is that once the person on the other end picks up and hears that I am using hold assist, they won't even know what that is and they'll hang up.
What are your thoughts and experiences with it?
Comments
I tested it during the beta of iOS 26
In my testing, I found out that it works pretty well. You get a notification that says that hold music has been detected and it asks if you want to hold the call and it will notify you when someone is ready for you. Once you tap the hold button, the call will live in the dynamic island and you can do whatever you like to do. The only thing is that it doesn’t know whether it’s a human or an automated message. For example, if it says something like we apologize for the delay, please continue to hold the next available. Representative will be available shortly, it will ring your phone Also, if you get an advertisement such as we have over 50,000 new customers out of a restaurant and we are introducing a new item to celebrate. Please check out menu at www.website.com. It will still ring your phone even if it’s an advertisement. When I answered one of those calls after I read the transcript and noted that it was a human picking up, they said that My Call kind of came in weird. I didn’t ask why, but I was imagining it had to do something with hold assist.
Not the same here
I am in Montreal.
Most if not all people in my circle has reported the same. Maybe it's a carrier level issue, but for my local paratransit service for example it's literally the exact same music as they demoed at wwdc, yet I manually have to hide keypad, go under more, and turn on hold assist. And of course these automated useless message the IVR speeks triggers the call after 30s-2min, as it can't apparently differentiate between an automated human voice and a real agent actually taking the call, so it's more or less useless for me.
But some services, like my bank, and CNIB!!!! let us choose if we want music, which type of music, or nothing at all, or better yet the system actually calling us back when the agent is there. But yeah it's rare.