NEW YORK (AP) — Hello? Anyone there? Facebook unveiled a new voice-calling app for Android phones on Wednesday, the same day that its WhatsApp messaging service introduced voice-calling for iOS devices.
Phone calls, it seems, are not dead yet.
Called "Hello," the stand-alone app is the seventh child of Facebook Creative Labs, the company's arm tasked with creating new applications outside of Facebook. Others, such as the news-reading app Paper or the video sharing app Riff, have met with limited success.
Hello's aim is to give people more information about who is calling them. Because it's connected to Facebook, Hello users can see information about their callers' identity even if they don't count them as a contact.
Hello is currently available in the U.S., Brazil and Nigeria.