Google’s New Scam Detection Makes You Phone Screen God

Because scammers love to call and impersonate places like your bank, Google is introducing a new Scam Detection feature for its Pixel phones that is a part of the Phone by Google app. The idea behind Scam Detection is to, well, detect scams in real-time using AI on your device in order to warn you of the potential threat you are facing.

How does Scam Detection work? It’s quite fascinating, actually. Google says that on-device AI can “notify you of a potential scam call happening in real-time by detecting conversation patterns commonly associated with scams.” An example would be if a caller asks you to transfer funds because of an alleged account issue, the on-device AI would pick up parts of the conversation and then alert you.

The alert would look like the image you are seeing below as a pop-up or screen on your phone during the call. You’ll also get audio and haptic feedback to make sure you know that Google’s on-device AI thinks the call is suspicious. A big red “End call” button will be a part of the notification to let you get out of the call in a hurry.

Of course, if Google’s AI is wrong, there is a “Not a scam” button to press to for you to keep the call going.

What about privacy, because this sounds super sketchy like Google AI is listening to your calls? Yeah, that is certainly something to consider, since Google AI is indeed listening to the caller and processing the words they are saying in order to decide if it is a scam.

First of all, this feature is off by default, so you don’t have to ever use it if you are worried about privacy. Second, if you do want to use it (it’s in the Phone app settings), Google is trying to make it as clear as possible that all of the AI processing happens on-device, so no conversation audio or transcription is stored on the device, sent to Google servers, or sent anywhere. It’s also not retrievable after the call ends.

You are taking Google’s word for that, so this is all up to you.

Want to try Pixel Scam Detection? To start, Google is only releasing this for the Pixel 6 up through the Pixel 9 series. It may roll it out to non-Pixel phones in the future, but we’re starting here. This is also a beta feature within the Google Phone app, so you will have to sign-up for the beta program in order to get it. Once you are in the beta program, you should get a Google Phone app update in Google Play that will bring the feature.

If that sounds good, links are below.

Join Google Phone Beta app program

// Google Security [2]