Truecaller Gets Updated With Smart SMS, Full-Screen Caller ID Features, Brings Home Tab

Truecaller Gets Updated With Smart SMS, Full-Screen Caller ID Features, Brings Home Tab. Truecaller announced a redesign and a new Smart SMS feature in a bid to improve its messaging offering. ... Truecaller says in a press release that the new tab will help users keep track of bills, payments, and budgets.

Truecaller announced a redesign and a new Smart SMS feature in a bid to improve its messaging offering. The hugely popular app is mostly known for its Caller ID service but it also has offers messaging and payments in the country. The redesigned version of its app that brings a Smart SMS feature to categorise all your SMS messages and chats under four distinct tabs. The updated Truecaller app has also brought a Home tab to offer your calls history, SMS messages, and instant messages — all under one roof.

Users get a full-screen caller ID interface that is available as an opt-in feature, in addition to the existing pop-up caller ID functionality. The new features have already started rolling out for Android users in India, and the Stockholm-based company has plans to bring the offerings to iOS and its global users in the coming days as well.

The major change that users will notice first is the revamped interface that has integrated the Smart SMS feature, which uses on-device machine learning to sort messages automatically into four groups. These are Personal, Important, Others, and Spam — Important being a new addition to the list, which will list all financial and payment messages.

Truecaller Full-Screen Caller ID Features

Truecaller says in a press release that the new tab will help users keep track of bills, payments, and budgets. The new tab will also list payment messages from other services. There are also plans to include travel reminders such as flight delays, bus seat allocation, live tracking, and updates on courier and postal deliveries, tax updates, and doctor and hospital appointments.

It all sounds similar to the classification of text messages by Microsoft on popular apps such as SMS Organizer. The feature on the Truecaller app not only works for SMS messages, but also for chatting using Truecaller, which is contained within the app alone, which will benefit users who are active on the platform.

Truecaller claims that all processing of its machine learning algorithm happens offline, and “no message leaves the mobile device.”

How does the spam filter work?

Truecaller already has an existing system to protect against spam messages and, of course, calls. The app has over 20 crore monthly active users, and it collects reports from these users as well as in-house algorithms to mark spam messages. According to Truecaller, it has blocked over 1,000 crore spam calls. Since spammers use multiple phone numbers Truecaller says it looks at not only the sender but also reads your messages (only offline, on your device, the spokesperson noted) to select its category appropriately.

“The categoriser is intelligent enough to adapt to, even if the sender is changed,” said Kunal Dua, Product Director, Truecaller Messaging, while addressing the media at a virtual press briefing.

Earlier, Truecaller did not allow users to flag messages that are incorrectly marked as spam. However, Dua said that users can now train the system and tell the app if the spam message ends incorrectly. However, manual reporting does not work with messages available in the Important tab.

“Soon, we will also let people manually mark messages as important that is if there is something which is let's say, not a bill, but maybe something from your kids' school that came in that you would like to remember or something that your wife sent or your kid sent to you that you would like to remember later, you can manually mark them as important and they will also show up in your Important tab,” he noted.

The marking of messages as important will work as how you star a message on WhatsApp or flag an email in your mailbox. However, you won't be able to set any contact as Important so that you'll receive all their messages in the tab.

To enable the new full-screen caller ID interface, you need to visit Settings > Caller ID > Full Screen.

Truecaller is rolling out the latest features for all its Android users in India this week. You only have to download the latest version from Google Play to experience the changes. However, for iPhone users, the company says the update is in the pipeline and will soon reach the Apple App Store. Some features will also not be available on the iPhone due to iOS restrictions.