Telekom and ElevenLabs: AI assistance directly in the phone call
Translation, questions, summaries: The Magenta AI Call Assistant brings AI into every phone call in real-time.
(Image: ricochet64/Shutterstock.com)
Just as you can bring an AI chatbot into a chat with conversation partners, in the future you will also be able to bring an AI assistant into phone calls. Telekom and ElevenLabs are making this possible. The assistant can then answer questions, translate, and summarize content in conversations – all directly from the web, as Telekom says. Agentic capabilities, such as reserving a table at a restaurant, should also be possible.
The service is called Magenta AI Call Assistant and is being presented by Telekom at MWC in Barcelona. “With our Magenta AI Call Assistant, we are the first worldwide to offer such AI functions directly from the web. We are removing barriers. No apps, no special devices, no technical complexity,” says Abdu Mudesir, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Telekom.
Customers in Germany are to be the first to benefit from the AI assistance. It is expected to be available later this year – when exactly is unclear. It is also not known what the service will cost. Telekom intends to announce this at launch.
“Hey Magenta” awakens the AI
Whether the offer will actually be well received remains to be seen. For example, when WhatsApp integrated Meta AI, there were protests. The AI chatbot only reacts to direct address in the chats. It can also be prevented from being brought into the exchange by a conversation partner.
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With Telekom, too, the assistant must be woken up using “Hey Magenta.” As long as it is not activated, no content of a conversation will be “stored or analyzed,” writes Telekom. Conversation partners will be informed if the AI is involved. To use the assistant, you must log in. According to Telekom, this reflects “European data protection standards and Telekom's commitment to responsible AI.”
The AI assistant was developed in collaboration with ElevenLabs. According to its statements, it is based on its models and agents. The capabilities of the Magenta assistant are generally the usual ones. Since the assistant is not yet ready for testing, no statement can be made about its quality. It is also questionable how the agentic capabilities will work. After all, these require access to the web.
(emw)
