If there’s one universal frustration in modern life, it’s being stuck on hold with customer service. You know the drill — you call your airline, your internet provider, or your bank, and suddenly you’re trapped listening to chipper elevator music or automated messages that loop endlessly while you’re told your call is very important to us. Well, Apple’s finally decided to do something about it with iOS 26’s new Hold Assist feature, and honestly, it’s about time.
Hold Assist is one of the standout additions to the Phone app in iOS 26, and it works exactly the way you’d hope it would. When you’re placed on hold during a phone call, the feature kicks in automatically after about 10 to 15 seconds. A notification pops up on your screen asking if you want to Hold this Call? and you can tap the Hold button to activate it. Once you do, your iPhone takes over the waiting game. The call continues in the background while you’re free to use your phone for literally anything else — scroll through social media, catch up on emails, watch videos, whatever.
The really clever part is what happens next. Hold Assist uses on-device intelligence to detect when a live person comes back on the line. It listens for hold music and can distinguish between recorded messages and an actual human voice. When someone’s finally ready to talk to you, you get a notification telling you it’s time to pick up, and you can tap it to return to the call. The feature even provides a transcript of what you missed, so you can see if anything important was said while you were away.
What’s particularly nice is that Hold Assist doesn’t require any setup or special settings — it’s not even an Apple Intelligence feature, which means it works on any iPhone that can run iOS 26. It just works right out of the box.
Now, here’s where things get interesting. This feature isn’t exactly new territory. Google introduced something nearly identical called Hold for Me way back in 2020 on the Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G. In fact, Google even released a somewhat snarky ad during Apple’s WWDC announcement pointing out that Pixel phones have had this feature for years. And they’re not wrong — Hold for Me has been a beloved Pixel exclusive for half a decade now, using Google Assistant and Duplex technology to wait on hold and recognize when a customer service rep picks up.
Google’s Hold for Me feature works in a very similar way. When you’re placed on hold, you tap Hold for Me and Google Assistant takes over. Your call gets muted, and the Assistant monitors the line using on-device processing, which means no audio from your call gets shared with Google or saved to your account. You see real-time captions on your screen showing what’s happening on the call, and when a representative is ready, you get a notification saying, Someone’s waiting to talk to you. The feature is available on Pixel 3 and newer models in several countries including the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Japan.
What makes Hold for Me particularly impressive is the AI behind it. Google’s Duplex technology doesn’t just recognize hold music — it can understand the difference between a recorded message saying, Hello, thank you for waiting and an actual human being coming on the line. This is crucial because so many customer service systems throw in automated messages and advertisements while you’re waiting, and the last thing you want is to be alerted every time one of those plays.
So yes, Apple is absolutely taking a page from Google’s playbook here. But honestly? That’s perfectly fine. The tech industry has always been about companies borrowing each other’s best ideas, and customers win when great features make their way across platforms. And many Apple users have been asking for this kind of functionality for years. Now they’re finally getting it.
What’s worth noting is that neither system is perfect. Hold Assist may struggle with voice-based automated messages or music with distinct lyrics. There have been user reports of the feature not always detecting when someone picks up the line, or occasionally alerting too early when it’s just another recorded message. But these are growing pains typical of any new feature that relies on audio detection and machine learning.
The real beauty of Hold Assist is how it respects your time. Customer service wait times can stretch to 20 or 30 minutes or more, and nobody wants to sit there listening to the same 45-second music loop on repeat while wondering if you’ll lose your place in the queue if you set the phone down. Now you don’t have to. Your iPhone becomes your patient proxy, sitting through the tedium so you don’t have to.
It’s also worth mentioning that Google has expanded its hold technology beyond just Pixel phones. In 2024, Google introduced Talk to a Live Representative through Google Search, which goes even further — it actually initiates the call for you, navigates phone menus, waits on hold, and notifies you when a human is ready. That’s currently an experimental feature available through Search Labs, but it shows where this technology is heading.
Here’s the thing, folks: For iPhone users, Hold Assist represents one of the most practical additions to iOS 26. It’s not flashy or attention-grabbing like some of Apple’s other announcements, but it solves a real, everyday annoyance that almost everyone deals with. And while Android users — particularly Pixel owners — might roll their eyes at Apple promoting a feature they’ve had for years, the end result is that millions more people now have access to a genuinely useful tool.
With that… Whether you’re an iPhone or Android user, we can all agree on one thing: anything that saves us from listening to terrible hold music is a win. Apple may have arrived late to this particular party, but at least they finally showed up.
If you haven’t used it yet, then try it next time!