Truecaller: Premium Caller ID

I recommend this app to everyone, especially busy professionals without secretaries and/or in a situation to be targeted by spam and cold calls. I find that the more I opt-out of contact lists, the more calls I get. Basically I’ve indicated that I’m a real person, and they have my phone number to sell to others. And spam callers often won’t even say who they are or why they are calling anymore until they believe they are speaking directly to you. I don’t have time for these “Am I speaking g directly with so and so?” games. I also fdont want to miss legitimate calls that I don’t immediately recognize. I wish I had a secretary to screen my calls. This is where AI comes in. This is my virtual secretary. Truecaller gives me caller id information flagging potential spam as the calls come in. In case it’s a legitimate call, it converses with the caller to get info and reason for the call and passes it onto me in real time. The spammer knows they’re not going to be pulling any funny business an AI secretary. Legitimate callers will provide their info to get connected. Viola! Call screened with no effort or evasion on my part. I can then decide to take the call by picking it up right away. Otherwise, I have a transcribed and recorded voice message for my records. I can also decide to add the phone number to my blocked number list. Spammers are using AI to prey on you. Fight back with your own AI ally. I’ve subscribed to Truecaller for a few years now and it gets better with time. The premium subscription is well worth your time and money.

I will start by saying I don’t think their is a great, 3rd party SPAM solution out there. They either reside on the phone and use Apple’s integration for 3rd party blocking or they sit in the middle using call forwarding settings. Truecaller with their premium subscription uses the later. Any call that is not in your contacts is forwarded out to their platform which then handles call control. Their auto attendant (assistant) answers the caller and asks them for their name (other options and questions can be customized) and then forwards this information to you through their app in a message type format. This in itself probably eliminates most robo and call spammers. Their autodialers usually just disconnect. The confusion comes in when it may be a caller that’s not in your contacts and you are unsure of. At this point you have two options: decline the call and the caller is disconnected or accept the call and let it ring into your VM or answer. I don’t think either of these are great options. Caller ID is even more cumbersome. I appreciate they have created a solution that gets around the poor integration of 3rd party CallerID but using Siri to lookup the name of the caller is just cumbersome and takes too much time. Who wants to talk to Siri during a meeting. The only true way to prevent SPAM is at the carrier and the switch level using STIR/SHAKEN which to be honest isn’t foolproof or fully baked across the industry but using your carriers option is still probably the best way to go. It’s not going to block “legitimate” robocalling marketers who burn through clean numbers as their CallerID but using your carriers app and turning on sending unknown callers to VM setting will silence your phone and most legitimate callers will leave a VM.

I was asked on this app’s site what could be done to improve it. My answer: Something, anything. This app has DONE NOTHING to identify any call. It asks ME whether the unidentified calls I receive, that are shuttled to my VM as they were before installing Truecaller, were from personal or business numbers, whether they were robo calls or scam or spam or fraudulent in any manner. It asks me whether to investigate the source of the call with an internet search. But each and every number that it “researches“ it returns the same result: nothing found. And then this app warns me in an ominous manner that if I block the questionable numbers, they will be blocked from all ways of contacting me, as though after all this, that is an undesired outcome. It also warns me in what feels like a threat that if I should decide to separate myself from the app ( which appears to be a totally useless app) that it may continue to monitor me and report on my call activities even when the Truecaller app is no longer on my device (not in that specific language, but that’s what it’s veiled wording means) it claims it will keep this reporting anonymous. I think perhaps monitoring peoples calls may be its only purpose, since it has not performed its stated purpose one single time in the weeks I’ve had it. And yes, I do have the premium subscription and my iPhone is operating at the 18.2 os. So…What say you?