“What is a sea monster’s favorite snack? Ships and dip.”

That’s one of the jokes Google Inc. claims Google Home users will have at their beck and call as the company added jokes and phone calls to their smart home device Wednesday.

The joke service, which has apparently been launched to coincide with National Joke Day, is being taken seriously by Google. The company explained in a post that “your cheesy, mostly funny Assistant [now] has a few jokes up its sleeve.”

While six-year-olds will no doubt get hours of enjoyment from the new joke feature, the more interesting new features for those who aren’t quite into corny jokes is support for making phone calls. First announced as coming soon at the Google I/O conference in May, the newly added support allows Google Home users in the United States and Canada to make phone calls through their device using voice commands.

Perhaps in keeping with the joke theme, Google said in a separate blog post that users can now do things such “Hey Google, call Dad” should they require information about ingredients while cooking in a kitchen – because seemingly that’s something Google Home users might do.

Although the new call service may be welcome, it does come with a limitation: It has no call number display support, meaning that when receiving calls from the smart home device, people on the other end will see “unknown” or “no caller ID,” unless they are Google Voice or Google Fi customers themselves. Notably, the ability to make calls using Google Home does not appear to require a Google Voice account and the calls are free, an interesting step in Google’s telecommunications offerings.

By adding call support to Home, Google has surpassed Amazon.com Inc.’s Echo, since that smart home device only supports calls to other Echo and Alexa app users. Given that Google has now added support for free phone calls, it may only be a matter of time until Amazon offers a similar feature. If it doesn’t, Google Home may well surpass the Echo in popularity in fairly short shrift, since free calling could be a killer application for the device.

Photo: Google