Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Monday announced two new features in its fight against spam calls.
According to the telco, the customers will receive SPAM alerts for calls and SMS messages in their preferred Indian languages. This new feature will be available in nine vernacular languages, with plans to add more in the future. Airtel’s AI-powered tool will now screen and alert customers to all SPAM calls and SMSes originating from international networks.
According to Airtel, there has been a 12% increase in overseas spam calls in the last six months.
“Once Airtel intensified its efforts to combat domestic spam calls, scamsters and spammers resorted to exploiting foreign networks to funnel fraudulent calls into India,” the company said in a stock exchange filing.
With these new features, Airtel expects to nullify international spam calls.
The upgraded AI-driven SPAM solution will now notify users about calls and messages from both domestic and
international numbers in ten Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada,
Malayalam, Urdu, Punjabi and Telugu. SPAM alert notifications using vernacular languages are only accessible to customers using Android devices. All these features continue to be free for customers and will get auto-activated for All Airtel customers without them having to raise a service request.
“With the growing volume of SPAM traffic shifting to foreign networks, we have decided to expand our AI-powered tool to scan all SMS messages and phone calls originating from international numbers,” Siddharth Sharma, Director Marketing and CEO Connected Homes, Bharti Airtel, said.
Airtel launched an anti-spam tool in September 2024. According to telco, it has identified 27.5 billion calls to date, which translates to 1560 spam calls every second. The company claimed that its customers have also seen a 16% decrease in SPAM calls since the launch of the anti-spam feature.