Caller ID App true caller Today it blocks between 38 and 40 billion unwanted calls annually for its more than 374 million users. Now, hoping to get more people to sign up for its premium tiers, it’s turning up the controls on its filtering technology. TechCrunch has learned that a new “Max” update for premium Android subscribers uses AI to block every call that doesn’t come from an approved contact, or that its AI determines may be spam, even if they aren’t already listed on Truecaller. database. Previously, blocking and other actions were guided by how numbers appeared in that database, combined with proactive screening of the individual.
The update is for Android only: Apple does not allow Truecaller (or other caller ID services) to check callers’ spam status to automatically block calls on iOS. Therefore, Truecaller has a more basic service for iPhone users based on CallKit.
The move comes at a critical business time for the company. In the fourth quarter, Truecaller saw a 4% year-on-year revenue drop, with 41.52 million dollars in sales. Meanwhile, in India (Truecaller’s largest market with 259 million users), the Indian telecom regulator recently proposed a caller ID service similar to Truecaller, which will be implemented in all telecommunications networks in the country, in an attempt to better combat spam. For now, the proposal has seen opposition for privacy and technology reasons, but if implemented, it would pose a direct competitive threat to Truecaller.
The new feature underlines how Truecaller believes there could be a business opportunity betting on people fed up with the insidious ways of spammers, even if a solution could come at the expense of missed calls from unknown numbers and non-spammers who might actually be welcome.
Truecaller is also piggybacking on the current interest in all things AI – caller ID and spam protection are Truecaller’s two main features – and is betting that any reservations about AI could be offset by curiosity about what It could just as well work to do Truecaller’s core work… while boosting premium subscriptions in the process.
The app’s premium tiers range from $9.99 per month to $99.99 per year, depending on factors such as the number of users covered.
The new feature is also a sign of how Truecaller is playing with ways to achieve more proactive automation and subsequently expect less proactive participation from the users themselves. Truecaller has always offered its subscribers a list of all calls it can potentially block, including international, hidden and unknown numbers that are not listed in a user’s contacts. But to get the most out of the app, users must participate and modify their own lists. Now, anything that is identified as dodgy will be blocked by default.
“It’s something that at least some people have asked for: people who understand the app very well,” Kunal Dua, Truecaller’s vice president of search, said in a call.
This is not the first AI feature in Truecaller: it provides a AI assistant which filters calls to identify why the caller has dialed the user. (Other non-AI features include cloud telephony and call recording.)
The AI that powers Max has been in the works for a while. Truecaller has been testing “several dozen algorithms” in its marketplaces to identify spam numbers, and each of these machine learning algorithms is also learning from user feedback, Dua said.
But it would take a significant change at Apple to roll out the service to iOS users. Last year, Truecaller brought live caller ID support for iOSalthough this is more limited and requires iPhone users to go through a process to set up live caller ID.
It will be interesting to see how users react to the comprehensive nature of a feature that can sometimes make mistakes. Currently, the app warns users that the feature “could block legitimate businesses.” However, the system is expected to improve over time as it receives more data from unwanted calls, Dua said.
“Obviously, we do our best to distinguish between spam and legitimate businesses. But there may be certain cases where some legitimate companies may temporarily [blocked]”He said. “We like to believe that it is temporary before our community and before our artificial intelligence algorithms can identify that this is a legitimate business… We have high confidence that if we call someone a spammer , there is a very, very high probability, 99.999 times out of 100.”
Users can unblock a number if its machine learning algorithms mistakenly flagged it as spam, which also helps train the AI.
After updating the Truecaller app to version 13.58 or later, users can find the new spam blocking feature by going to Settings > Block.