Google’s smart speaker can now pull double duty as a phone for voice calls. The company just confirmed that it’s rolling out Google Home’s calling feature in the US and Canada beginning today. Users can dial anyone in their contacts and local businesses for free — so long as the call recipient is in one of those two countries. The calling feature was first announced back in May.

In turning its speaker into a phone, Google is taking another step to challenge Amazon and its Echo devices, which introduced calling and messaging features earlier this year. But the two companies take a significantly different approach in how the feature actually works and who you’re able to communicate with.

To place calls with Home, you just say “OK Google, call (recipient).” You can also do “Hey Google” if that’s your preferred phrase for activating the speaker. The person you’re calling needs to be stored in Google Contacts for things to work right, so if you’re using another app or service for contact management, you’ll want to make sure those numbers are also in Google’s cloud. You can also tell Home to call a business or just speak aloud a specific number you want to dial.

Though it might seem like Home is basically just acting as a speakerphone, that’s not the case. Calls are made over Wi-Fi, so they don’t use your phone plan’s minutes. In fact, Google Home calling is entirely separate from your smartphone. That’s both good and bad at the moment, which I’ll get into next.

Wait, what? I don’t want people to think I’m a spammer. How do I link my Google Voice or Project Fi number to Google Home?

You can tell Google Home to display the phone number you’ve got tied to either Google Voice or Project Fi by going to the Assistant settings in your Google Home smartphone app for Android or iOS. Once that’s done, recipients will see your number show up instead of the terrible “no caller ID” thing.

It’s super important to know that you cannot initiate emergency calls to 911 using Google Home at this time. This is probably because calls are actually made over Wi-Fi and not with your mobile device, so 911 might have trouble pinpointing an accurate location for whoever’s calling. Still, this seems like something Google should work to resolve. Being able to yell out for 911’s help if you can’t make it to a phone seems like a pretty critical use case for a device inside your house that can now do voice calling.

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