Google introduces live scam detection feature on Android phones

Tech giant, Google, is rolling out AI features on Android phones including its Gemini Nano functioning as live scam detection for users.

Google unveiled this at its annual developer conference on Tuesday, where it announced several AI-related updates.

According to Google, Gemini Nano will be used to detect scam phone calls in real time, providing users with warnings and helping them avoid falling victim to fraud.

The company said most of the features announced for Android phones will be available later this year and will be rolled out first to Google’s Pixel devices.

Google further announced that the Gemini Nano will be available on-device for other features in the coming months. This means that an Android phone will be able to understand context, such as sights, sounds, and spoken language.

Gemini Nano’s multimodal capabilities will be used in TalkBack and are aimed at people experiencing blindness or low vision.

According to the company, new updates are also coming to Google’s Circle to Search, a feature that enables users to search pictures, text, and other information with a gesture without closing an app.

Google said it is expanding the feature to better suit students’ needs. The update enables a person to circle a prompt and get step-by-step instructions to solve math or other problems directly from an Excel sheet or other document.

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“Starting today, Circle to Search can now help students with homework, giving them a deeper understanding, not just an answer — directly from their phones and tablets. When students circle a prompt they’re stuck on, they’ll get step-by-step instructions to solve a range of physics and math1 word problems without leaving their digital info sheet or syllabus.

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“Later this year, Circle to Search will be able to help solve even more complex problems involving symbolic formulas, diagrams, graphs, and more. This is all possible due to our LearnLM effort to enhance our models and products for learning,” the company stated.

Google at the developer conference also announced new upgrades to its Gemini Pro 1.5 model, which gives the Google flagship chatbot the ability to make sense of a massive amount of data.

“Today all of our 2 billion user products use Gemini. But we’re still in the beginning of our Gemini era,” the company posted right after the live event kicked off.

Google said the Pro model, starting with prompt sizes of up to 1 million tokens, or pieces of data, will be available in 35 languages to users who pay for the ‘Gemini Advanced’ subscription.

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The improved Gemini 1.5 Pro – considered a breakthrough in long context understanding – will also be offered with 1 million tokens to all developers globally in private preview.

Google’s AI updates announcement came a day after its main rival, OpenAI, also announced  ChatGPT-4o, an updated version of ChatGPT-4. According to OpenAI, the new large language model trained on vast amounts of data from the internet will be better at handling text and audio and can work with 50 languages.

With the announcement, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, said that a key part of the company’s mission was to put AI tools in the hands of everyone for free or at a great price.