Android TalkBack: Phone Calls

Hi, my name is Ricky Enger. And today we're gonna talk about how to use our phone for making and receiving calls. We're using a Google Pixel phone for our workshop here but what we're learning should be pretty much the same for a lot of other Android phones as well.

For some phones, though, the gesture for answering and hanging up our calls isn't gonna work because the phone is set up with a version of TalkBack that's a little different than what we have here. We do have some really great resources showing exactly what to do if the steps here don't work for you. So go ahead and scroll down the workshop page and check out the resources area to find that. Plus, there's info on how to contact us if you need to.

You know, it's kind of funny that we use our phones for so many different things and then we think, oh yeah, it can make and receive phone calls too. So yeah, that's what we're gonna talk about today. It sure would help if somebody would call right now, but I mean, what are the chances that just randomly...

Google Assistant: Phone call from Hadley.

Ricky: Oh, wow. Wishes do come true. We've got a call coming in. To answer, we're just gonna use our two fingers and double tap. So here we go. Two fingers and tap tap.

Google Assistant: Selected +1847-446-8111.

Ricky: And just like that, we've answered our call. And now that the phone isn't ringing it's worth mentioning a couple of things. On that incoming call screen, TalkBack read out our caller ID, which is awesome. We also have some options there that we can swipe through, including an option to decline the call. So yeah, have fun exploring that call screen just by swiping left and right to see what's available. And then double tapping with one finger to select any of those things. Oh, but here we are just talking away and our phone call is still active. Let's go ahead and hang up. To do that, there's actually nothing new we need to learn here. We'll just use that same gesture; our two finger double tap to disconnect. So let's do it. Two fingers and tap tap.

Google Assistant: Pixel launcher.

Ricky: Yep. That did it. Okay, good. Now how about making calls? We're gonna check out our phone app and show how to make calls from there. We have our Google Assistant too, and if it's set up on our phone we just need to access it in whatever way we usually do. Whether it's saying hey, Google, or holding down on the power button or again, whatever your particular phone is set up to do. We can then do something like this, call 800-323-4238. And it's gonna call that number. If we've created contact, then it's even easier. We can, for example, access our assistant and say, call Hadley.

Google Assistant: Phone selected. Calling.

Ricky: And off it goes. We'll just double tap real quick with two fingers to stop that

Google Assistant: Selected Hadley.

Ricky: Anyway, back to our phone app. We'll open it just by touching it on our home screen.

Google Assistant: Phone. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: And of course, double tapping.

Google Assistant: Phone. Search contacts and places edit box. Double tap to edit text. Actions available. Use tap with three fingers to view.

Ricky: Okay, cool. We're at the top of our screen and we're always gonna be able to start here and then just swipe through each option that's available. It's a great way to explore and also to make sure we don't miss anything, but sometimes we might be looking for one particular thing and it can take a little while if we are at the top left, for example, and what we need is all the way at the bottom right. So yeah, having a general idea of where things are located can really help us get around quickly. So what we're gonna do is find a landmark down at the bottom of our screen and then go from there. Now we're doing this with our navigation bar turned on. So we have our back, home, and overview buttons down at the bottom. If your phone doesn't have that navigation bar and you wanna turn it on, we have a really good resource if you scroll down the workshop page here that shows how to turn it on. And yeah, if you wanna leave that navigation bar off, that's cool too. Everything should be in the same general area that we're describing here. You just won't have those little buttons to serve as landmarks. All right, so let's get to it. We're actually going to head down to the bottom right corner of our screen where our overview button is for showing our open apps. So let's touch it.

Google Assistant: Overview button.

Ricky: Yep. Here we are. Now let's move our finger up just a bit.

Google Assistant: Voicemail. Tab four of four in list. Four items. Window phone. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Yeah, we got it. Now, visually this voicemail tab is up and just a tiny bit to the right of our overview button on this phone, but we still found it pretty easily just by sliding our fingers straight up. Now, if you expected TalkBack to say voicemail and instead it said contacts and there are three tabs instead of four, it's all good. You're still in the right place. We're gonna keep showing how things are on the Pixel phone here, but yeah, if the layout is just a tiny bit different for you, the general concepts are still the same. So anyway, the takeaway from everything TalkBack just told us is that we're focused on a tab. It's our voicemail tab on this phone. We can double tap to select it. And when we choose one of these tabs it will change the options on our screen. Talkback said we are on tab four of four, which of course means we have three more of these tabs to explore. So just real quick, let's swipe left one time. We'll swipe.

Google Assistant: Contacts. Tab three of four. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Yeah. And there's our contacts tab. So if we select this one it's going to give us options to add new contacts, plus show our existing ones that we can call. So let's double tap then, since we're here.

Google Assistant: Contacts selected.

Ricky: Okay, that's helpful. TalkBack tells us which of these little tabs is selected. Now, to the left of contacts we have our recent tab, which will show all our most recent calls. And then to the left of that, we have our favorites tab, where we can add people that we call all the time so we don't have to scroll through our alphabetical list of contacts to find them. So that's our tabs, but seems like we're missing something, right? Where's our keypad for entering a number to dial? Yeah, good question. Let's head back over to the bottom right of our screen and we'll touch our overview button.

Google Assistant: Overview button.

Ricky: Yep, and now we'll slide up just a little to find the last tab in our row here.

Google Assistant: Voicemail tab.

Ricky: Okay, cool. Now one more time, let's just slide our finger up a little.

Google Assistant: Keypad button. Out of list. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: All right, there it is. And we can double tap here of course, so let's just do that as our last item for today.

Google Assistant: Selected edit box. Phone keypad.

Ricky: Yep, we're here. We have our keypad on the bottom third of our screen. This edit box we're in now will show us any numbers we've entered so far. And our dial button is down in the bottom center of our screen, just above our home button. It's cool because we can press numbers on this keypad and really explore this screen all day long and nothing will happen until we double tap that dial button to actually make the call. All right, let's head over to the back button down in the bottom left hand corner of our screen to close our keypad for now

Google Assistant: Back button.

Ricky: Yep. Let's double tap that.

Google Assistant: Phone. Search contacts and places edit box.

Ricky: And there we go. We're done. Our keypad is closed and we're back in our phone app. Okay. Wow, that was a lot. But hey, now we can use our phone as, well, an actual phone. Imagine that. I'm Ricky Enger and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today exploring the phone app. See you next time.