As tech giant Apple announced at WWDC that its refreshed iOS 26 will now sport AI-powered call screening features, many users were reminded of another spam call detection service, Truecaller, that has helped Indian mobile users for over a decade now.
While Truecaller also has an AI-powered call assistant service to screen unwanted calls, the company notes that more than 90 per cent of the users of this feature use it on Android (its key platform right now) and that it is not worried about Apple. Apple’s simple call screening on iOS is not really a direct competitor to the current version of our AI Assistant, a Truecaller executive told businessline on Tuesday.
“The effect of the new Apple iOS call screening launch will be minimal at best, as iOS isn’t our focus for the Assistant. What Apple presented yesterday, looks similar to our V1 Assistant that we launched 3 years ago, asking callers why they are calling and presenting this to the user with the ability to answer or reply via text. We also launched our V2 last year, an intelligent AI powered Voice Assistant that can have a real conversation with callers, take actions on the users’ behalf and introduced far more advances functionality,” Raphael Mimoun, Cloud Telephony Product Director at Truecaller, said.
The Truecaller Assistant uses AI to filter the information given by the caller and is able to tell phone users with “more than 90% accuracy” if the call is spam or not. However, it is not live in iOS in India, Truecaller’s main market, because of technical iOS ecosystem restrictions. Overall, 450 million people across the world now use Truecaller.
Apple on Monday introduced “Call Screening” where iPhones powered by iOS 26 will automatically answer calls from unknown numbers and ask callers the purpose of their call. The iPhone will then show the phone user a transcription of the reason stated for them to act on it. While the developer beta is out now, the public release of iOS 26 is expected to be in September. Apple’s call and messages screening features launched in WWDC come years after many of its competitors like Google and Samsung have already implemented them.
Truecaller itself released live caller ID feature for iPhone users in January 2025 after Apple allowed developers access to its Live Caller ID Lookup framework.
“In late January, we launched our new iOS product, which is primarily a Premium offering…In April, we gradually started to see a promising growth trend of more paying subscribers on iOS, adding almost 55,000 subscribers which is equivalent to a 6% month-over-month growth since the end of March,” Rishit Jhunjhunwala, CEO, Truecaller, said during the company’s earnings in May. However, the strongest growth currently is coming from markets outside of India, he added.
Recognizing the consumer pains from rising spam calls, telecom operators too are now offering spam detection services in a basic form. Airtel’s AI-powered solution, developed in-house, uses a proprietary algorithm to identify and classify calls and text messages as ‘suspected spam’.
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Published on June 10, 2025