Google could let callers bust through your Do Not Disturb settings

Google is rolling out an update to the Phone app that could allow callers to get past your Do Not Disturb settings. The new feature – part of Expressive Calling – allows the caller to indicate that their call is urgent to get past Do Not Disturb settings the receiver has in place.

Android already offers a way for particular callers to bypass Do Not Disturb settings. Adding particular contacts to your favourites list or enabling repeat callers (twice in 15 minutes) allows contacts to bypass Do Not Disturb settings. That's great for family members, but if you happen to be in a different timezone and someone is calling for a catch-up, you might get woken by something that's not urgent.

The idea behind the new approach – called Call Reason – is that the caller can indicate that a call is urgent and the receiver can elect to allow urgent calls through the filter. That means that a call about a family emergency comes through, but if they don't say it's urgent because they are just calling to gossip about the neighbours, then you remain undisturbed.

When the "urgent" option is used, the receiver will be notified with an "It's urgent!" message on the screen along with a siren emoji. The urgent status will also be recorded in the call history.

According to 9to5Google, this feature is currently limited to those on the Phone by Google beta, so it's likely to be a little time before this feature hits the mainstream and rolls out to all users. What's not clear is if this will be a universal Android feature or restricted to Pixel.

Do Not Disturb is managed through it's own set of controls, while this new features falls into the Phone settings, so some users might miss that this option is available unless they go looking for it.

Do Not Disturb is a powerful feature, offering plenty of customisations to not only silence your phone, but to do so on a scheduled basis. That can be linked to digital wellbeing features too, for example changing the screen to greyscale so you're less tempted to keep scrolling in the evening.

The addition of urgent should mean that loved ones can get through when they really need to, but there's nothing to stop contacts misusing the system and saying it's urgent when it really isn't. At least the receiver has settings on their ends to control that, but I wonder how many people will get calls from friends late at night saying that it's urgent that they get to the club because they're missing a great night out.