How to Answer Phone Calls on AirPods

Handling phone calls with AirPods and AirPods Pro is a wonderfully convenient feature to use.

If you’re wearing AirPods and receive a phone call, you might wish to answer a phone call while wearing the AirPods earbuds.

And of course you can also hang up phone calls with AirPods too, so you’re not going to be stuck on a phone call that you answered and now want to get off of.

Naturally you must have setup AirPods with iPhone or AirPods Pro to be able to use this feature, as a lack of cellular capability will not allow for phone calls to arrive to the iPhone and AirPods.

How to Answer Phone Calls with AirPods & AirPods Pro

1. Assuming the AirPods are already in your ears, when a call comes in you will hear a ringing tone
2. For AirPods: Double-tap on the outside of an AirPod to answer the phone call
3. For AirPods Pro: press the force sensor to answer the phone call

Once the phone call has been answered, the call can be entirely handled through the AirPods (unless you need to dial additional number for extensions and so forth, in which case you’d need to use the iPhone again).

And of course you can also hang up phone calls on the AirPods as well.

How to Hang Up a Phone Call with AirPods & AirPods Pro

1. When you’re on an active phone call and you’re ready to get off the phone with AirPods
2. For AirPods: Double-tap on the outside of the AirPod to hang up the phone call
3. For AirPods Pro: press the force sensor to end the phone call

So in short, whether you are answering a phone call, or hanging up a phone call, you will use a double-tap gesture on AirPods to answer the call or end the phone call.

If you wish to, you can customize AirPods tap controls to perform other actions as well.

Note the difference with answering and ending phone calls on AirPods and AirPods Pro. For the standard AirPods, you use a tap gesture, whereas for the AirPods Pro you use a squeeze on the sensor. That’s a subtle difference, but a necessary one to understand how the call answering and ending features work on both types of AirPods.

You can accept standard cellular phone calls or FaceTime Audio calls on AirPods, but obviously not FaceTime Video calls as there is no camera capability (yet anyway, perhaps a distant AirPods release will include a camera for such an occasion? Think big!).