Google Home Is Now Officially a Voice-Controlled Phone

 The next step in speech taking over from texting as communications become ever simpler and easier.

And hopefully the voice recognition features are well enough protected to prevent hacking. Emphasis on hopefully. JL

Raymond Wong reports in Mashable:

With a simple "OK Google, call..." voice command, you can immediately phone millions of businesses and personal contacts for free over Wi-Fi. If you're still clinging onto your landline, you might as well throw it out right now. More than just hands-free calling, the feature leverages the power of Home's built-in Google Assistant, which can identify individual voices so it knows when you or someone else like significant other is making a call request.
You now have no excuse to not call your mom more often. Google announced hands-free calling for its Google Home smart speaker back in May, and now the feature is finally rolling out to users in the U.S. and Canada.

With a simple "OK Google, call..." voice command, you can immediately phone millions of businesses and personal contacts for free over Wi-Fi. If you're still clinging onto your landline, you might as well throw it out right now.

More than just hands-free calling, the feature leverages the power of Home's built-in Google Assistant, which can identify individual voices so it knows when you or someone else like significant other is making a call request.
For example, if you say "OK Google, call my mom," the Assistant will understand that you want to call your mom and not your partner's. It's pretty smart and really demonstrates how powerful Google's artificial intelligence is.
Similarly, you don't even need to have a specific business's phone number saved in your Google Contacts for hands-free calling to work. You could say "OK Google, call the nearest pizzeria" and it'll use your location to figure it out.

Google says people receiving calls from Home will see "Unknown" or "No Caller ID" show up. But they're working to get your connected phone number to display by the end of the year. If you use Google Voice or Project Fi you can opt-in to display your number within the Google Home app.
We've yet to try the hands-free calling feature so we can't say how well it works, but if it's anything like the voice calling feature on Amazon's Echo, it should be pretty sweet.