Google launched a faster and more secure platform for public use of WiFi - Orion. The tech giant also announced a new feature named Verified Calls on its Phone app to prevent people from getting scammed via calls or messages.
Orion, is designed to bring private, secure and fast Wi-Fi roaming for consumers at public places.
Orion Wi-Fi is a new platform from Area 120, Google's in-house incubator for experimental projects.
According to the company, Orion Wifi uses existing networks to connect more visitors, and to provide a new revenue stream to the venue owner.
Orion Wifi works with most commercial and enterprise Wi-Fi systems, usually with no new hardware or software.
Google is also working with the Wireless Broadband Alliance on the emerging Open Roaming standard to make Wi-Fi roaming more powerful.
The Verified Calls feature, on the other hand, is pre-installed on several Android phones and will be available for download later this week on other devices in India and other select countries.
Much like TrueCaller, the new Google feature shows the caller's name, logo, reason for calling and a verification symbol indicating that the business has been authenticated by Google.
"This is done in a secure way and Google doesn't collect or store any personally identifiable information after verification," the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
Verified Calls is initially rolling out in the US, Mexico, Brazil, Spain and India, with more countries to come.
According to many reports, phone calls are the easiest method used by scammers to scam people, and Google has been piloting the feature for the past few months.
"We've been piloting Verified Calls for a few months, and the early results indicate that it improves the likelihood of someone answering a call," Google said.
For instance, banks calling to alert a customer about a possible fraudulent transaction can increase answer rates by stating the call reason.
"We also have existing partners including Neustar, Five9, Vonage, Aspect, Bandwidth, Prestus, Telecall, and JustCall. Ready to help brands improve their answer rates by using Verified Calls," Google said.
