Sweden-based Truecaller, an app used to verify contacts and block unwanted communication, will likely bring its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered feature, Call Assistant, to India in the April-June quarter, Rishit Jhunjhunwala, managing director and chief product officer at Truecaller India, told FE.
Truecaller was armed with the AI capabilities when it acquired Israel-based CallHero for $4.5 million in January 2022. The feature will essentially enable users to see why a person is calling, thereby helping them decide if they want to answer the call, or not. If a call goes unanswered, the caller will be directed to the AI-powered assistant, and through the voice-to-text technology, users will know the reason for a call. Call Assistant can also receive calls on behalf of users, take down messages and even block calendars.
While the feature is currently live only in the US, Jhunjhunwala said it would be introduced in India next quarter.
Asked why the company has waited for over a year to introduce the feature in its biggest market globally, Jhunjhunwala said: “The services need to be fine-tuned. We’re currently running tests to make sure the feature is seamless, especially because India is a country of many languages and for AI to process each of them properly, it takes time.”
The plan to roll out new features comes at a time when most companies, all over world, are reducing their ad spends, that was especially crucial for Truecaller — because 80% of its total revenues come from the ads it runs on the app. The remaining 20% was equally split between revenue generated from its paid subscribers and Truecaller for Business, its B2B offering. However, Alan Mamedi, CEO and co-founder, Truecaller, was not too worried about his company’s heavy reliance on ads. “I think certain companies and brands will always need to do ads. We are not worried (about ads accounting for 80% of Truecaller’s revenue) at all. That’s the reality,” Mamedi told FE.
Along with new features, Truecaller, which opened its largest office space outside of Sweden in Bengaluru on Thursday, said it had also addressed concerns iPhone users had previously flagged. They had complained that the app did not work properly on iPhones. “iPhones were not really a focus for us. About 95% of our users were on Android but now the share of iPhones users on Truecaller is increasing, hence we had to rebuild our entire iPhone app, and reintroduced it in August last year. And, as a result, our active users grew 60% between August and December 2022,” Mamedi said.
Truecaller currently has 338 million monthly active users (MAU) globally, of which 248 million were from India alone, making it the largest market for the company. Egypt is Truecaller’s next largest market, followed by Nigeria for now. Truecaller’s growth rate is directly proportional to the number of smartphones sold.
“Today, we have about 55% of connected smartphones in India using our service more or less every day. If we just keep the same pace, India is expected to have around 700-800 million connected smartphones by 2026,” Mamedi said. By then, Truecaller hopes to have 400-500 million MAUs as it continues to register a growth rate of 10-15% year-on-year.
