EXPERIENCE WITH THE HOLD ASSIST FEATURE

In my testing, I found out that it works pretty well. You get a notification that says that hold music has been detected and it asks if you want to hold the call and it will notify you when someone is ready for you. Once you tap the hold button, the call will live in the dynamic island and you can do whatever you like to do. The only thing is that it doesn’t know whether it’s a human or an automated message. For example, if it says something like we apologize for the delay, please continue to hold the next available. Representative will be available shortly, it will ring your phone Also, if you get an advertisement such as we have over 50,000 new customers out of a restaurant and we are introducing a new item to celebrate. Please check out menu at www.website.com. It will still ring your phone even if it’s an advertisement. When I answered one of those calls after I read the transcript and noted that it was a human picking up, they said that My Call kind of came in weird. I didn’t ask why, but I was imagining it had to do something with hold assist.

I am in Montreal.
Most if not all people in my circle has reported the same. Maybe it's a carrier level issue, but for my local paratransit service for example it's literally the exact same music as they demoed at wwdc, yet I manually have to hide keypad, go under more, and turn on hold assist. And of course these automated useless message the IVR speeks triggers the call after 30s-2min, as it can't apparently differentiate between an automated human voice and a real agent actually taking the call, so it's more or less useless for me.
But some services, like my bank, and CNIB!!!! let us choose if we want music, which type of music, or nothing at all, or better yet the system actually calling us back when the agent is there. But yeah it's rare.

Hi,
I'm in the US.
I can't remember what company I was calling, but for the first time ever, hold assist kicked in all on its own.

For the feature to work properly, all of the following must be true:
• If calling Apple accessibility, you must pick a genre of music
• your phone must be on ring

I completely agree with Alicia‘s concern. Whether I like it or not, most of the iPhone using planet it’s certainly going to be thrown off when they pick up on the other end after whatever in determinate whole time has been for that call and get this new whole assist audio message and chances are good it’ll throw them off their script and they’ll hang up. I certainly will never use it for calls that would matter to me to businesses/government/any commercial enterprise which ironically are pretty much the only goals or rather I should say, most of the calls I make.

I've tried it before and it worked once where a human picked up as I called my local paratransit service. There have been times where an automated message answers and my phone will ring but it won't be a human on the other end. I am a bit scheptical to say the least. Also when I call my primary provider they have an option for a representative to call back after i've pressed option 2 and subsequently enter my phone number.

i have not updated, so i don't have first hand experience, but i'm not even interested in trying it out, the whole thing doesn't make any sense. if you're put on hold, just put it on speaker, so when a person pick up, you answer it. time tested, work great 100%, why invented some useless feature like hold assist?

Someone told me that I would have to hit the More button to turn it on. What's the point of turning on hold assist when you have to jump through hoops just to make it work?