Google's AI is all set to monitor your phone calls for potential scams

Google will soon bring a new AI-powered feature to Android that will alert users about potential scam calls. The company made the announcement on day 1 of the ongoing Google I/O 2024 developer conference.

Citing an annual study by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), Google points out that people lost more than $1 trillion to fraud in 12 months between October 2022 and 2023. The new feature is designed to protect against common phone scams that result in such financial fraud.

Scam call alerts on Android will be powered by Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device AI model currently running on the Pixel 8 Pro and the Galaxy S24 series. The AI will essentially listen to your phone calls in real-time and provide on-screen alerts if it detects something fishy.

For example, you’ll hear a noise during the call and receive a warning on-screen if a so-called bank representative asks you to urgently transfer funds, make a payment with a gift card, or disclose your personal information like card PINs or passwords, which are uncommon bank requests.

Google says the real-time call processing will happen on your device, so your conversations don’t leave your handset. It’s not very different from how Live Captioning works during calls right now. This means only your device will have access to your conversation data, not Google or any third parties.

The scam calls alert feature will be optional when it rolls out. Google will share more details about it later this year, possibly when it launches the feature. Our guess is it will first roll out to Pixel phones that run Gemini Nano before it reaches any other Android devices.