Jio’s Phone Call AI, the telecom giant’s highly anticipated feature for transcribing and summarising phone calls, potentially sparks serious concerns around privacy and data protection.
Showcasing its latest AI innovations at the 2024 India Mobile Congress, Reliance Jio offered attendees an exclusive preview of Phone Call AI, currently in alpha testing.
First introduced at Reliance’s 47th annual general meeting in August, this feature allows Jio subscribers to use AI to automatically transcribe phone calls. It can also summaries conversations and translate them into other languages.
“This [Phone Call AI] allows anyone to easily capture and access important voice conversations, making them searchable, shareable, and understandable across languages — all with just a few clicks,” Jio said.
To ensure transparency, the company initially claimed the service would periodically notify all parties that the call is being recorded. However, the IMC demonstration of Phone Call AI lacked such disclosures. Informing all participants that their conversation is being recorded and transcribed by AI is essential to safeguarding their privacy.
How to use Phone Call AI
While still in the testing phase, here’s what we learned about Phone Call AI at IMC 2024. Reliance Jio subscribers will likely need to opt in via the MyJio app, meaning it won’t be enabled by default for all users. Upon opting in, subscribers will provide consent for their calls to be recorded and stored on Jio’s servers.
To get started, users would add the Phone Call AI number (1-800-732-673) as a participant to the ongoing call. The recording process begins after pressing #1 and ends by pressing #3. Approximately two minutes later, Jio sends the AI-generated transcript and summary of the call via SMS or WhatsApp.
The AI-generated transcript and summary are not automatically shared with other call participants. Jio’s Phone Call AI is powered by an in-house AI model that reportedly achieves 90% accuracy, according to technicians at Jio’s IMC booth.
Potential concerns with Phone Call AI
Jio says that recorded calls will be stored on Jio Cloud in an encrypted format, with each subscriber receiving 100 GB of free storage. However, it remains unclear whether recordings, transcriptions, and translations will be stored outside the subscriber’s Jio Cloud. There is also no clarity on whether these recordings will be used to train Jio’s AI model.
Speaking at IMC 2024 15 October, Reliance Jio Chairman Akash Ambani emphasized the importance of data localization and called on the Indian government to update its data centre policy.
AI tools like Jio Brain, Glam AR, Bharat Diffusion, AI Headshots, and Fify — a fashion Chabot from Reliance-owned Find — were also showcased at this year’s India Mobile Congress.
