Truecaller, a caller ID app, stops between 38 and 40 billion spam calls every year for its more than 374 million users. It is now making its screening tech stronger in order to get more people to sign up for its premium plans. TechCrunch has learned that the new “Max” update for Android paid users blocks all calls that aren’t from a permitted contact or that the AI thinks might be spam, even if the caller isn’t already in Truecaller’s database. Before, blocking and other actions were based on how numbers were mentioned in that database and on the person’s own screening.
The change is only for Android: Apple doesn’t let TrueCaller or other caller ID services check to see if a caller is a spammer so that iOS users can instantly block those calls. Because of this, Truecaller has a simpler service for iPhone users that is built on CallKit.
The company is making these changes at a very important time for business. In the fourth quarter, Truecaller’s sales dropped 4% year-over-year to $41.52 million. On the other hand, India, which has 259 million users and is Truecaller’s biggest market, recently suggested a caller ID service similar to Truecaller that would be used by all telecom networks in the country to better fight spam. For now, people are against the plan because they worry about privacy and technology. But if it goes through, it would directly compete with Truecaller.
With this new feature, Truecaller shows that they think there may be a business chance for people who are sick of spammers’ sneaky ways, even if it means missing calls from unknown numbers and people who aren’t spammers, which some people might actually want.
Truecaller also takes advantage of people’s current interest in AI. Its two main features are Caller ID and spam protection, and the company hopes that people’s doubts about AI will be balanced by their interest in how well it can do Truecaller’s main job, which will also lead to more premium sign-ups.
The app’s paid plans run from $9.99 a month to $999.99 a year, and they depend on things like the number of users they cover.
The new feature also shows that Truecaller is trying out different ways to make automation more proactive. As a result, users should be less aggressive in how they interact with the app. Truecaller has always given its users a list of all the calls it might block, including calls from foreign, hidden, or unknown numbers that aren’t in their contacts. But people need to use the app and change their own lists to get the most out of it. From now on, anything marked as “iffy” will be banned by default.
In a call, Kunal Dua, vice president of search at Truecaller, said, “At least some people have asked for it—people who know the app very well.”
This isn’t Truecaller’s first AI tool; it also has an AI assistant that screens calls to find out why the caller called. (Cloud telephony and call recording are two other tools that aren’t AI.)
Max’s AI has been in the works for a while now. Truecaller has been trying “multiple dozen algorithms” across all of its markets to find spam calls. According to Dua, each of these machine learning algorithms is also learning from what users say.
But Apple would have to make some big changes before they could offer the service to iOS users. Last year, Truecaller added support for live caller ID to iOS. This isn’t as good as on Android, though, and iPhone users have to go through a process to set it up.
What users think about a tool that sometimes goes wrong and is all-in will be interesting to see. At the moment, the app tells users that the feature “might block legitimate businesses.” Dua said that the system should get better over time as it gets more info about spam calls.
“Of course, we do our best to tell the difference between spam and real businesses.” He did say, “But there are times when some legitimate businesses may be temporarily blocked.” “We’d like to think it’s only temporary until our community and AI systems can figure out that this is a real business…” When we call someone a spammer, we are very sure that it is 99.999 times out of 100 that they are actually a spammer.
There is a way for users to clear a number that the AI mistakenly marked as spam. This also helps train the AI.
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Users who have updated their Truecaller app to v13.58 or later can find the new spam-blocking function by going to Settings > Block.
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