ANDROID owners will soon notice a life-saving new alert on their phones to stamp out vicious scams.
Google is planning a fresh feature that listens out for key signs of fraud calls and tells you before you make a huge mistake.
And it’s all made possible with AI.
Google’s Gemini AI tool will work on-device – meaning conversations aren’t sent off somewhere online, the AI does the scanning directly on your phone.
When the tech picks up on red flags of a scam caller, it’ll instantly ping users with a warning.
The clever feature will tell you it’s a “likely scam” and detail why.
In an example revealed by Google at its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, a person claiming to be from a bank told the receiver they will need to send money to an account.
The red alert flashed up during the call, saying: “Banks will never ask you to move your money to keep it safe.”
It does this by listening out for language and conversation patterns.
Other terms that may trigger an alert include people claiming to be a “bank representative” asking you to urgently transfer funds, make a payment with a gift card or requests personal information like card PINs or passwords.
Bosses say that the feature is still in testing at the moment but it’s expected to arrive in a future free upgrade for Android later this year.
AI is front and centre of Google’s upcoming Android upgrades.
The firm said Gemini AI is “context aware” so that it anticipates what you’re trying to do to be a more helpful assistant.
Google’s dedicated Gemini app will hover in place over an app in future so you don’t need to go elsewhere to use it.
“We’re at a once-in-a-generation moment where the latest advancements in AI are reinventing what phones can do,” explained Sameer Samat, president of Android Ecosystem.
“With Google AI at the core of Android’s operating system, the billions of people who use Android can now interact with their devices in entirely new ways.”
Analysis by Jamie Harris, Senior Technology and Science Reporter
The AI battleground is seriously heating up as all the big guns in tech fight it out for a slice of the action.
Google’s annual I/O event has been in the calendar for months and OpenAI brutally announced a surprise “spring update” would happen the day before.
One expert described Chat-GPT4o as making other voice assistants look “utterly primitive”.
Let’s not forget Apple and Amazon?
Apple is reportedly “nearing” a deal with OpenAI to improve Siri on iPhone.
And Amazon is racing to upgrade Alexa with some AI too.
All this is just in the voice assistant arena.
AI is becoming unavoidable.
Everything from internet searches – as Google announced today – to the photos you take on your phone has some form of AI influence these days
