More than half of Americans reported receiving at least one scam call per day in 2024. To combat the rise of sophisticated conversational scams that deceive victims over the course of a phone call, we introduced Scam Detection late last year to U.S.-based English-speaking Phone by Google public beta users on Pixel phones.
We use AI models processed on-device to analyze conversations in real-time and warn users of potential scams. If a caller, for example, tries to get you to provide payment via gift cards to complete a delivery, Scam Detection will alert you through audio and haptic notifications and display a warning on your phone that the call may be a scam.
This is common for companies that like to hire PhDs.
PhDs like to work on interesting and challenging projects.
With nobody to reign them in, they do all kinds of cool stuff that makes no money (e.g. Intel Optane and transactional memory).
Designing a realtime scam analysis tool with resource constraints is interesting enough to be greenlit but makes no money.
Once released, they’ll move on to the next big challenge, and when nobody is there to maintain their work, it will be silently dropped by Google.
I’m willing to bet more than 70% of the Google graveyard comes from projects like these.
And they never ever ask themselves “Is this ethically the right thing to do”. And so they create things that do way more harm for society than good. For selfish reasons, just because it is a “fun” project. And I’m sure management figures they will profit one way or another the more they control everything thru their AIs they shove on people.