Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Feed Link: https://www.engadget.com/
---

Title: Google's live scam detection for phone calls is now out for Pixel
devices

Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2024 14:30:17 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/g...

One of the Gemini AI-powered features Google introduced at I/O this year was
a solution for never-ending scam calls. It has the capability to detect
whether a call is suspicious while it's still ongoing and can alert you so
that you could drop the call as soon as possible. That live scam detection
feature for phone calls is now available for Pixel 6 and newer devices, as
long as you're part of the Phone by Google public beta program in the English
language.

"[S]cam calls are evolving, becoming increasingly more sophisticated,
damaging and harder to identify," the company said in its announcement. Scam
Detection uses on-device AI to determine whether a call is a potential scam
in real time. For instance, if the caller tells you it's your bank and asks
you to transfer funds to another account because yours had allegedly been
breached ΓÇö a common scam tactic ΓÇö you'll get an audio and a haptic alert.
When you look at your phone, you'll see a visual warning, along with a button
to easily end the call. If the AI ends up making a mistake, you can tap on
the "Not a scam" button instead.

Google

Scam Detection is off by default, and it's up to you whether you want to
activate it. Google says it doesn't send your calls or their transcripts to a
remote server, because the feature processes phone calls on-device. On the
Pixel 9 series, it's powered by Gemini Nano, which Google describes as its
"most efficient model for on-device tasks." On Pixel devices older than the
Pixel 9, it's powered by the company's other machine learning models.

Google didn't say when live scam detection will make it out of beta, but it
promised that it's coming soon to more Android devices. In October, the
company also rolled out enhanced scam detection for Messages, which also uses
on-device machine learning models to identify scam texts.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/g...
phone-calls-is-now-out-for-pixel-devices-143017096.html?src=rss

---
VRSS v2.1.180528