Scam Detection is a new feature that detects and warns you about attempted phone scams as they happen.
At Google I/O in May, the company teased a new feature that warns you about phone scams. The feature works by analyzing your call audio on-device and looking for suspicious sounding phrases during your conversation. Today, Google announced that Scam Detection is rolling out to English-speaking Phone by Google public beta users in the U.S. with a Pixel 6 or newer device.
I'm sure you've received at least one attempted phone call scam in your life, and if not, you've certainly heard about others receiving them. These scams are designed to trick you into transferring your money to the scammer, either directly through a bank transfer or indirectly by buying a ton of gift cards. Scammers often use emotional manipulation tactics to trick you into sending them money, such as by asserting a loved one is in immediate need of assistance. With the improvements in AI technology, these phone scams have only become more sophistocated, as many now use voice cloners to sound like someone you might know.
Google's new Scam Detection feature aims to halt these scams in their tracks. The feature processes voice calls to detect and warn you when the person on the other end is trying to scam you. It looks for conversation patterns commonly associated with scams, like when a “bank representative” asks you to urgently transfer funds. If so, your phone will play a tone, vibrate, and show a visual warning that you might be talking to a scammer.
The Scam Detection feature is opt-in and audio is processed on-device by machine learning models, meaning your voice calls never leave the device. You can turn it off for all calls in the Phone app settings or during a particular call.
When Google originally teased this feature in May, it said the feature would utilize the company's latest Gemini Nano with multimodality model, which is currently only available on the Google Pixel 9 series but is coming to devices powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 and Snapdragon 8 Elite. That led us to assume the Scam Detection feature would be exclusive to the Pixel 9 series. Fortunately, while the Scam Detection feature is powered by Gemini Nano on the Pixel 9 series, it's powered by "other robust Google on-device machine learning models" on Pixel 6+ devices.
We asked Google to confirm if there are any differences in efficacy between Scam Detection on the Pixel 9 and older Pixels, and it seems it's too early to definitively tell right now. A spokesperson for the company told us that it's looking to gather feedback during this beta testing period so it can understand how it can improve the feature's performance. Google says it wants to provide the best possible model to power this feature on the Pixel 6 and later, but from a technical perspective, newer Pixel devices should inherently benefit from having this feature be powered by the latest advanced Gemini Nano model.
In any case, Scam Detection is a great feature, and I'm happy to see Google finally roll it out. Though it's only available for the Pixel 6 and later in the U.S. right now, Google says it's "coming soon to more Android devices," so we hopefully won't have to wait long for it to roll out more widely.
