Beware! Your phone calls may be monitored in real-time. Know about Google's AI-powered scam detection tool

Google is currently one step ahead of others regarding scam detection tools as it is already working on software that can monitor phone calls in real time and flag them in case it detects any suspicious activity such as fraud. This idea by Google was unveiled recently during a conference for software developers, according to an NBC News report. The scam-detection feature primarily uses Artificial Intelligence to monitor the patterns of a scam or fraudulent activity and alert the user accordingly during the call itself.

Automatic scam detection

During the conference, there was a practical demonstration of the call, in which a Google executive received a call from someone impersonating a bank and asking him to move all his savings to a new bank account. Amid this call, the Google executives' phone flashed a notification suggesting that this was a probable scam. The notification also mentioned that 'banks will never ask someone to move their money to keep it safe'. According to NBC, this notification came with the option of ending the call immediately.

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A privacy risk: Reports

Although this feature, undoubtedly, enhances security and may reduce fraud calls and scams, it has also irked privacy advocates who are voting against this feature coming into implementation. For starters, this feature could be tweaked by various tech companies, government agents, political parties and others to eavesdrop on people's phone calls and even steal private information from any sensitive calls made.

Even though Google claims that the audio processing to be done by the AI software will be private, it still leaves open the possibility of hackers, government agencies and powerful entities getting access to phone calls.

FAQs:

1. Who is Google's Vice President for engineering?
Google's engineering wing is closely monitored by Dave Burke, the Vice President for engineering at Google. He is the person who demonstrated the AI-based automatic scam detection software under development.

2. Will Google be able to detect phone scams?
Fraudulent calls, that can be potential scams, will now be easily detected by Google using an AI-based call monitoring software that will warn users about probable scams amid the call itself.