Airtel Uses AI to Fight India Spam Calls

India’s second-largest telecom company, Bharti Airtel, said on Wednesday that it will give its users an AI-powered spam detection service to help stop the massive problem of spam calls and messages in the country

The business says India’s first network-based, AI-powered spam detector is the answer. The tool will immediately inform Airtel customers about calls and texts that might be spam; all users can use it for free. About 387 million people in India use Airtel’s telecom service.

Indians have been dealing with a never-ending trash stream for a long time. A recent poll by startup LocalCircles showed that an impressive 95% of users say they get unwanted calls daily, with most getting at least three calls daily. The government’s “Do Not Disturb” (DND) registry hasn’t worked well, as the poll found that 90% of registered users are still getting spam.

The managing director and CEO of Bharti Airtel, Gopal Vittal, said that the company built the new spam detection system over a year. He said, “Spam has turned into a threat to customers.”

Airtel said that the new system has two layers of security: at the network and IT systems layers, messages are filtered. The company said Airtel’s data scientists developed a special algorithm that looks at caller usage patterns, call frequency, and call length in real time.

The company said that this AI-powered system can handle an incredible 1.5 billion messages and 2.5 billion calls daily and can spot 100 million possible spam calls and 3 million spam SMS messages daily.

In addition to filtering, the AI system checks SMS text for harmful links by comparing it to a central database of URLs that have been blocked. This extra layer of security is meant to keep users from clicking on sketchy links by accident, which is a frequent way for fraud and phishing to happen.

The system can also find strange things, like IMEI changes that happen a lot, which the company says are often signs of scams.

India has a bigger problem with phone spam than just being annoying. Indians also report a sharp rise in calls from con artists pretending to be from the government, delivery services, and credit companies.