(Credit: Google)
A new Google update for Android enlists AI eyes and ears to try to stop scams in progress.
AI scam detection, announced Tuesday as part of a new set of default Android features, does on-device scanning of text messages from non-contacts to warn you that what might seem like an innocuous text is actually the start of a “pig butchering” con or some other attempt to defraud you. The “Likely scam” warning lets you report and block the offending number with one tap.
A second scam-alert feature offers the same real-time scanning for calls but is getting a much more limited rollout: It’s an opt-in beta for Pixel 9-series phones, which have the hardware required to run Google’s on-device Gemini Nano AI library.
This software listens to calls from numbers not in your contacts list for phrases and speech patterns that suggest a financial fraud in progress—like a request for a bank account number—and will buzz the phone and flash a “Likely scam” alert on the screen.
(Credit: Google)(It’s not that hard to spoof a phone number, so a call that seems to be from a friend’s phone could be something worse while escaping this feature’s attention.)
When Google demoed this feature onstage at Google I/O last May, privacy experts warned that the underlying technology could be abused for less helpful purposes.
A separate post from Google product managers Lyubov Farafonova and Alberto Pastor Nieto outlines the guardrails built around this optional feature: It doesn’t record or store any audio or transcripts and “will beep at the start and during the call to notify participants the feature is on.”
A second Google feature aims to help connect you to people you do want in your life: live sharing of your location with designated people for designated periods. This feature built on Google’s Find My Device system evokes the Find My Friends app Apple introduced more than a dozen years ago before moving that functionality into other iOS apps.
Two other additions to Android cover more specialized use cases. A new Shopping Insights feature in Chrome lets you track the price of an item at an online store by clicking a graph icon in that browser’s toolbar, while Android Auto has a new set of games that you can play when the car is parked.
Pixel users will get an extra set of features in Google's latest Pixel Drop update, which is now rolling out to eligible phones. The most interesting among them considerably expands the utility and coverage of the satellite messaging feature on Pixel 9-series phones. SOS emergency messaging now works in Alaska and Hawaii as well as Canada, the UK, and Europe, while in the US, T-Mobile and Verizon subscribers will be able to text people via satellite.
Pixel 9 phones will also get an update to the Pixel Studio app that adds the ability to generate images of people from text prompts and support for multiple-camera streaming on social apps by pairing a second Pixel phone or a GoPro camera.
Finally, Google’s Pixel Watches are getting what Google describes as more accurate step tracking, the Pixel Watch 2 gains the automatic bedtime mode of the Pixel Watch 3, and the Watch 3 picks up two health features: menstrual health tracking and the “Loss of Pulse Detection” that the Food and Drug Administration just approved, which can automatically call for medical help if it detects you are in a state in which you will not make it to the next Pixel Drop or even the next half an hour.