Airtel’s AI-Powered Spam Detection Expanded to Indian Regional Languages, International Calls and SMSes

Airtel announced an expansion to its network-based artificial intelligence (AI) solution for spam calls and messages detection on Monday. The AI-powered tool, dubbed AI spam detection, can automatically identify and detect spam calls and SMSes and send a notification to users to alert them. The alert is sent in almost real-time so that users can make an informed decision before they pick up the call or respond to the text message. The tool will now support ten Indian regional languages as well as international numbers.

Airtel's AI Spam Detection Tool Gets an Expansion

In a press release, the telecom service provider announced the expansion of the AI-powered solution. The network-based spam detection tool can now notify users about spam calls and messages from international numbers, alongside domestic numbers. Users in India will get these alert notifications in ten regional languages, including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Users will also continue to receive these notifications in the English language. Airtel plans to add support for more languages in the future.

The telecom operator highlighted that these spam alert notifications in vernacular languages are currently only available to Android device users. The company did not mention if there are plans to expand the feature to iPhone users as well. Notably, AI-powered spam detection is a free feature to all users with a valid Airtel connection and is auto-activated, so users do not have to raise any service requests.

Airtel claimed that ever since the launch of the AI tool in September 2024, it has detected and sent notifications about 27.5 billion spam calls to users.

At the time of launch, the telecom operator claimed that the AI-powered tool is a proprietary algorithm-based technology developed by Airtel from scratch. The algorithm automatically analyses numbers based on multiple parameters before identifying the sender as a spammer. Some of these parameters include the sender's usage patterns, call and SMS sending frequency, call duration, and others. The telecom company had said that these parameters are monitored in real-time.