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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- AT&T’s digital receptionist will use AI to screen your calls.
- The goal is to determine if a call is legitimate or spam.
- The feature will roll out this year as a test for select AT&T customers.
How often do you receive a call from an unknown number and debate whether to answer it? Spam calls continue to plague us all, often making us hesitant to answer our phones unless we know who’s calling.
Now AT&T is turning to AI in an attempt to protect us from the spammers and scammers who tie up our phones.
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Rolling out as a test to select customers throughout 2025, the new AT&T digital receptionist will act as an automated call screener.
Instead of you trying to decide whether to answer, this assistant will pick up the call itself. Using voice-to-voice and agentic AI skills, the receptionist will then ask questions to determine if the caller is human or bot, if the call is urgent, and whether it meets criteria that you establish.
How call screening works
Here’s how such a scenario would play out, as described by AT&T Chief Data Officer Andy Markus in a Tuesday blog post.
The digital receptionist will answer an incoming call on your behalf, posing such questions as “Who may I say is calling?” or “What is this in regard to?” If the caller checks the right boxes, then the call is passed through to you. If the call concerns something that the AI is equipped to handle itself, such as taking a message or accepting a delivery, it may be able to complete the conversation on its own.
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OK, but what if the caller refuses to identify themselves, it’s a wrong number, or the call doesn’t meet your criteria? In those cases, the receptionist will either hang up or take a message. As the initial interaction plays out, you can view a live transcript of the conversation and opt to pick up the call at any point. You can also let the call finish, view a summary when it’s over, and then decide if you want to return the call.
Naturally, you don’t want every call screened this way, especially ones from family, friends, and other contacts. For that, you’re able to add people to a “Do Not Screen” list so that their calls are automatically put through without the AI screening.
Test phase
For now, the receptionist is decidedly in the test phase, which means that AT&T is still tweaking its capabilities and adding new features. But if all goes well, the carrier envisions even more AI-powered smarts down the road.
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As one example posed by Markus, a future AI agent could automatically connect you to a restaurant to make reservations on your behalf. To kick this off, you would tell the AI the name of the restaurant and the date and time for the reservation. The agent would not only connect you but could even book the reservation on its own.
Of course, we know that today’s AI bots are far from perfect. They’re prone to mistakes. They can confuse or misinterpret directions. They often fail to understand the context or meaning of our words. That’s why this is a test, to see if and how an AI-based receptionist can be helpful without running into too many hiccups.
AI concerns
To address concerns about such an AI, Markus also explained the technology behind it.
For the receptionist, AT&T is using multiple large language models (LLMs) to process the incoming speech, create the responses, and then turn those responses into speech. Programmed with fraud prevention and spam-fighting algorithms, the receptionist is designed to look for patterns of spam or fraud, prompting it to end the call if such signs are detected. The company also promises that your private information stays secure and is used only to help the receptionist determine how to handle the call.
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Spam call filters and features are already available from AT&T and other carriers, as well as from OS and app developers. Some of those have also been tapping into AI. But even with such filters, the burden is often on you to figure out whether to answer a call. If successful, AT&T’s digital receptionist could be a useful next step in automatically determining how each call is handled.
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