It seems that CallJoy, a model for fee-based services for the small business market that was launched in May 2019, is shutting it down on July 22.
Acording to a Google spokesperson provided the following statement: “Like all projects from Area 120, CallJoy was an experiment. We’re proud of the team’s work and achievements, and we look forward to seeing the great things they’ll continue to do at Google.”
The virtual agent SaaS offered answered calls, filtered spam (which included inside sales calls) and provided basic business information (e.g. , hours) to consumers, and cost $39 per month.
Originally, CallJoy was aimed at two different SMB problems:
- Helping owners avoid common calls, which could distract them, ensuring their customers got answers to questions
- Offering call transcripts and customer analytics.
So why would Google shut down CallJoy? There’s a possibility that Google obtained a suitable amount of useful insights from CallJoy, and now has no use for it. Of course, another more likely possibility is that there wasn’t enough adoption in revenue for Google to justify continuing the service.