Airtel's AI now flags international spam calls on your phone
What's the story
Airtel, a leading telecom company in India, has announced major upgrades to its anti-spam measures.
The firm is expanding its AI-backed spam detection tool - which has flagged over 27.5 billion such calls - to tackle the rising menace of international spam.
The move comes after an alarming 12% rise in overseas spam calls in the last six months.
Mechanism
A look at the feature
The AI-powered tool from Airtel will screen and warn customers about spam calls and SMSes from international numbers.
The move comes as Airtel acknowledges changing spam tactics, where scammers are increasingly using foreign networks.
Siddharth Sharma, CEO of Connected Homes at Bharti Airtel, stressed on the importance of customer feedback in shaping these enhancements.
Availability
Spam alerts in 9 languages introduced
Airtel is also bringing spam alerts in nine regional languages.
The feature, which is available on Android devices, will provide clearer warnings to users across India.
The supported languages include Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, and Punjabi.
Sharma said these enhancements are focused on better serving India's linguistic diversity and combating the growing SPAM traffic from foreign networks.
Effectiveness
Airtel's anti-spam tool has been very effective
Since its launch in September 2024, Airtel's anti-spam tool has proven extremely useful, flagging an average of 1,560 spam calls per second.
After the introduction of this tool, Airtel customers have seen a 16% reduction in unwanted communications.
To note, all the new capabilities will be automatically enabled for Airtel customers at no additional cost.