By Ellen Fraser, | March 03, 2016
Hands Free is both available for Android and Apple phones.
Google has rolled a new app called Hands Free that allows people to pay for items without even having to take their smartphone out of their pockets.
Hands Free is both available for Android and Apple phones. It is being tested currently in a few locations in the San Francisco area, including some McDonald's and Papa John's restaurants. Hands Free, which was first announced last May during Google's I/O developer conference, is designed to be a companion to Android Pay, the separate Google-owned payments service.
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Using the app is simple First, users must download a corresponding iOS or Android app, enter in their initials, choose a payment method (both debit and credit are supported), and then upload a photo of themselves. It relies upon Bluetooth LE and WiFi to gauge when a particular customer is near a checkout kiosk, according to BGR.
When a customer approaches the checkout counter, the app sends over the individual’s photo and initials to the point of sale system. If said customer indicates that they would like to pay with Google, the cashier simply asks for the customer’s initials and verifies that the photos match up. Google said that in some stores, users would not even need to provide their initials.
At some stores, Google is also experimenting with an in-store camera to verify the user’s identity automatically based on their Hands Free profile picture. Google said images and data from these cameras are deleted immediately and cannot be accessed by the stores. Users can get $5 off to their first purchase using Hands Free, Techno Buffalo reported.
“When you think about a user, in a bunch of situations, the experience is quite crummy right now, it’s quite clunky. You don’t want your phone in the way, your wallet in the way; you don’t want your cash in the way. These are inconveniences that happen multiple times a day,” Google senior director of product management Pali Bhat said in a blog post.
Previously, both PayPal and Square have tried similar initiatives in the past and both have failed to take off, mostly due to a limited number of participating merchants and the sheer enormity of trying to replace credit cards and cash.
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