The Expressive Calling feature for Android is starting to hit some devices, though it appears to be a slow rollout, or at least a staggered rollout that won’t hit all users immediately. Expressive calling is a feature that adds a handful of new enhancements to the calling experience. The first new function of Expressive Calling goes by the same name, and it allows you as the user to enhance calls with “visual and haptic feedback.”
The other parts of this new feature are Call Reason and Urgent Call. The Call Reason function just allows you to see what the reason for the call is. More specifically, when a call is marked as urgent. That way, you can make a more informed decision as to whether or not you want to pick up the call. If a call is marked as urgent, you probably should pick it up. However, this leaves the door open for people potentially abuse the ability to mark calls as urgent. Why? Because urgent calls will bypass the Do Not Disturb Mode . Meaning, you’ll still hear the phone ring when one of these calls comes in. There is a silver lining, though.
Expressive Calling on Android will let you block urgent calls from interrupting DND
This is something that you’ll probably want to use with caution, and for good reason. If a call is actually urgent, then the last thing you probably want to do is ignore it. However, you also don’t want just anyone calling you nonstop if it’s not really urgent. This is why there’s a toggle for you to enable so that urgent calls can interrupt Do Not Disturb.
If you enable this toggle, then they will be able to interrupt it. If you leave it disabled, though, then DND will do its job and prevent all calls from interrupting it. Save for any contacts to whom you give the ability to make those interruptions. Like your partner, parents, or certain friends.
Expressive Calling has not appeared for us on the Pixel 10 Pro , which also has the latest version of the Phone by Google app. So it’s clearly not going to be available for everyone just yet. You shouldn’t need a Pixel 10 series device for this feature to be available. However, Google did announce it alongside the Android 16 QPR2 update for Pixel devices.
