Airtel announces new features in its continued fight against SPAM

(Pramod Shrivastav)

Udaipur : Following the launch of its AI powered spam detection tool that flagged over 27.5 Billion
calls as SPAM to its customers, Airtel today announced the introduction of two significant
enhancements aimed at staying ahead of spammers. Customers will now receive SPAM alerts for
calls and SMS messages in their preferred Indian languages. This new feature will be available in ten
vernacular languages, with plans to add more in the future. Airtel’s AI-powered tool will now screen
and alert customers to all SPAM calls and SMSes originating from international networks. Once Airtel
intensified its efforts to combat domestic spam calls, scamsters and spammers resorted to exploiting
foreign networks to funnel fraudulent calls into India. This alarming trend resulted in a 12% increase
in overseas spam calls in the last six months. Airtel expects to nullify this growing challenge with its
new feature.
Commenting on the initiative, Siddharth Sharma, Director Marketing and CEO Connected Homes,
Bharti Airtel, said: “Customers and their feedback are at the heart of everything we do. After carefully
analysing customer feedback, we have enhanced our solutions to better serve the linguistic diversity of
India. Additionally, with the growing volume of SPAM traffic shifting to foreign networks, we have
decided to expand our AI-powered tool to scan all SMS messages and phone calls originating from
international numbers. Our dedicated team of engineers and data scientists will continue to refine and
enhance our offerings, ensuring we stay ahead of any and all emerging threats.” The upgraded AI-
driven SPAM solution will now notify users about calls and messages from both domestic and
international numbers in ten Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil,
Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Punjabi and Urdu. SPAM alert notifications using vernacular languages
are only accessible to customers using Android devices. All these features continue to be free for
customers and will get auto-activated for all Airtel customers without them having to raise a service
request.