New Delhi, Sep 25 (IANS): As the Centre asked telecom service providers to purge spam calls and messages on an urgent basis, Gopal Vittal, Managing Director and CEO of Airtel, said on Wednesday they have launched an AI-powered spam detection solution that would alert customers in real time about suspected spam calls and SMSs.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has asked telecom operators to stop spam calls and messages and comply with its direction regarding the whitelisting of URLs, APKs and OTT links.

Speaking to IANS, Vittal said that with the help of this AI tool, 99.5 per cent of spam messages and 97 per cent of spam calls can be easily identified.

The AI solution will be made available to users from Thursday.

"Airtel had been working on this AI model for about a year. The users will be alerted by getting information about spam on dial. This will also reduce the risk of fraud. Currently, we are able to identify 97 per cent of spam calls through this AI tool. Our effort is to cover the remaining three per cent in the coming time," Vittal told IANS.

He further said this service is free for all users and there is no need to download any special application.

Designed as a dual-layer protection, the solution has two filters – one at the network layer and the second at the IT systems layer. Every call and SMS pass through this dual-layered AI shield.

"In 2 milliseconds, our solution processes 1.5 billion messages and 2.5 billion calls every day. This is equivalent to processing 1 trillion records on a real-time basis using the power of AI," said Vittal.

The solution has been able to successfully identify 100 million potential spam calls and 3 million spam SMSs originating every day. Developed in-house by Airtel’s data scientists, the AI-powered solution uses a proprietary algorithm to identify and classify calls and SMSs as “Suspected SPAM”.