Meghna Barik, Pune
Bharti Airtel Ltd. on Wednesday introduced India’s first spam detection service powered by artificial intelligence (AI) ,that will become available to all its users free of cost from Thursday.
Offering real-time notifications for spam calls and SMSs this new tool is positioned as a direct rival to the Swedish spam-filtering app Truecaller.
After a year of development the AI-powered service has already shown its worth by detecting and evaluating 3 million spam SMS messages and 100 million possible spam calls every day. A little over two million spammers have also been successfully blocked by the system.
Working with variables like caller or sender behavior call/SMS frequency and call duration it categorizes questionable communications under the label Suspected Spam. Accurate identification is ensured by cross-referencing this data with known spam patterns.
The service’s capability to identify malicious links sent via SMS is one of its primary features. To prevent users from unintentionally clicking on dangerous links the system scans each SMS in real time and maintains a central database of blacklisted URLs. Announcing the services availability to all 387 million Airtel smartphone users Gopal Vittal managing director and chief executive officer of Bharti Airtel made a statement.
In order to provide greater protection for all of their customers he also underlined that the company is attempting to expand this technology to its feature phone users. Airtel has asked telecom providers to exchange business-to-business data in order to reduce the possibility that calls that are actually made for business purposes could be interpreted as spam.
This measure is intended to mitigate the risk of crucial calls from platforms like Swiggy and Zomato being mistakenly classified as spam. In addition Vittal stated that the company is prepared to work with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Department of Telecommunications to share information about spammers in order to potentially prosecute them.
Spam still exists even with TRAI and telecom operators’ best efforts to curb it. This is especially true given the proliferation of spam from over-the-top (OTT) apps such as WhatsApp. In order to solve the growing problem and give users a more secure and spam-free communication experience Airtel has launched a new AI-powered solution.