More than half of Americans reported receiving at least one scam call per day in 2024. To combat the rise of sophisticated conversational scams that deceive victims over the course of a phone call, we introduced Scam Detection late last year to U.S.-based English-speaking Phone by Google public beta users on Pixel phones.
We use AI models processed on-device to analyze conversations in real-time and warn users of potential scams. If a caller, for example, tries to get you to provide payment via gift cards to complete a delivery, Scam Detection will alert you through audio and haptic notifications and display a warning on your phone that the call may be a scam.
I’m not American, but my country has largely moved off phone and SMS but we still get spam messages on WhatsApp and Telegram. The spam and scam will chase you wherever you go, if they haven’t, it just means those platforms aren’t popular enough in your region for them to switch to.