Airtel to spot international spam calls; alert users in vernacular languages

New Delhi, April 21 (IANS) Bharti Airtel on Monday announced two major upgrades to its AI-based spam detection tool to protect users from spam calls and messages.

The telecom company will now alert customers about international spam calls and SMS messages.

In addition, users will receive spam alerts in their preferred Indian languages -- making it easier for people across the country to understand and respond to these warnings.

This new feature will be available in ten Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Punjabi, and Urdu.

Airtel said more languages will be added in the future. Currently, the alerts in regional languages are available only for Android users.

The move comes after Airtel noticed a worrying trend. While the company’s spam detection tool had successfully reduced domestic spam, scammers started using foreign networks to make spam calls to Indian users.

This led to a 12 per cent increase in international spam calls over the last six months. The latest upgrade is aimed at stopping this new threat.

Airtel’s AI-powered tool, which was launched in September 2024, has already flagged more than 27.5 billion spam calls.

That’s equal to identifying around 1,560 spam calls every second. Since its launch, Airtel customers have also experienced a 16 per cent drop in spam calls.

Siddharth Sharma, Director, Marketing and CEO Connected Homes at Bharti Airtel, said that customer feedback played a big role in bringing these changes.

“With more spam traffic now coming from international sources, we’ve decided to expand our AI tool to monitor all foreign calls and messages. We’re also making it easier for customers to understand these alerts by offering them in their regional languages,” he said.

These features are being automatically rolled out to all Airtel customers and will remain free of charge. Users don’t need to take any action to activate them, he added.

--IANS

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