What does your feature entail? What is it for?
I’d like Quick Answers to recognise and render common URI schemes such as tel: and mailto: as proper clickable links, rather than displaying phone numbers and email addresses as plain text.
For example, if a Quick Answer contains:
it could automatically render them as:
This would allow the browser or operating system to hand the action off to the appropriate application (phone app, email client, etc.).
At the moment, when Quick Answers surface contact information, users often have to copy and paste it into another application. Supporting standard URI schemes would make Quick Answers feel more integrated with the platform and reduce friction, especially on mobile devices.
How will it affect existing workflows or user experience?
This should be a purely positive enhancement with minimal impact on existing behaviour.
Users who just want to read the information can continue doing exactly that. Users who want to act on it can do so immediately with a single click or tap.
For me, this would most often be useful when looking up businesses, support contacts, restaurants, schools, local services, and similar searches where the next step is usually “call them” or “send them an email”.
It feels like a small change, but it would make Quick Answers noticeably more useful and polished.
What are the exact ways that you see a user using your proposed feature?
The most obvious use case is contact information.
For example, if I search for:
“British Gas customer service number”
and the Quick Answer returns a phone number, I should be able to tap it and have my device offer to place the call immediately.
Similarly, if I search for:
“Contact Kagi”
and the Quick Answer contains an email address, tapping it should open my default mail client with a new message.
This is particularly useful on mobile, where copy-and-paste workflows are much more cumbersome.
Current workflow:
- Search for a business.
- Find the phone number in Quick Answers.
- Copy the number.
- Open the Phone app.
- Paste the number.
- Call.
With URI support:
- Search.
- Tap.
- Call.
The same applies to email addresses.
Many browsers and apps already do this automatically. Safari, Chrome, Firefox, iOS, Android, Google Search and Apple Maps all recognise phone numbers and email addresses as actionable content and expose the appropriate action when selected.
I think this fits naturally into the existing Quick Answers experience. No new UI is needed; it’s simply about rendering recognised contact details as links using the appropriate URI scheme.
Longer term, it could potentially be extended to things like sms: or geo: links, but even just supporting tel: and mailto: would cover most of the real-world use cases.
