Enlarge Image James Martin/CNET

A new utility from Google could save your life.

The company on Monday announced that emergency services will be given your precise location if you call them with an Android smartphone.

Product manager Akshay Kannan in a blog post pointed out that 70 percent of emergency calls come from mobile phones, and that "accurate emergency location can be the difference between life and death."

He adds that the GPS information is sent directly to emergency services, and is "never seen or handled by Google."

The service, dubbed the "Emergency Location Service", works on all phones running Android 2.3 and up (essentially, any Android phone from 2011 onwards). It was launched on Monday in the UK and Estonia, and will soon make its way to other nations.