Google LLC expanded its lineup of products for small businesses today with the introduction of CallJoy, a virtual assistant that aims to take some of the hassle out of fielding customer calls.

The offering is debuting exactly a month after the search giant started broadly rolling out the much-touted Duplex artificial intelligence caller. It’s a feature inside Google Assistant that can find a restaurant’s phone number, reserve a table for the user over the phone and then create an entry in her calendar.

CallJoy has the same goal of improving the customer service experience, but takes a different approach to doing so. The assistant filters spam calls that might unnecessarily hold up the line while providing features to help businesses process legitimate customer inquiries faster.

“Nearly half of small business calls go unanswered because owners are just too busy or assume the caller is another spammer,” Bob Summers, Google’s general manager for CallJoy, wrote in a blog post. “CallJoy helps small business owners offer better customer service, make more informed business decisions and ultimately increase productivity.”

The assistant can field questions pertaining to basic business information such as opening hours to free up staffers for other work. And if a customer calls to perform a task, like making an appointment, CallJoy will send them a text with a link to the relevant section of the business’ website. The SMS-based automation tool can also direct users to outside services such as a restaurant’s page in a food delivery application.

Google has paired these core features with a fairly versatile et of analytics capabilities. CallJoy records calls (after informing customers first) and generates searchable transcripts that businesses can mine for useful information. A hair salon, for instance, might scan call logs to see what types of haircuts customers ask about the most.

CallJoy provides higher-level insights as well, displaying metrics such as peak activity times and what percentage of inquiries are from return callers. The idea is to help businesses find ways of distributing their limited resources more efficiently so that workers can answer phone inquiries faster while also attending to customers in the background.

CallJoy is currently available in early access. Google is charging $39 a month per business line, though the pricing might change once the service releases into general availability.

Photo: Google