Seattle-based spam and fraud protection Hiya has launched an AI-powered assistant that it claims can stop deepfake scams in real time. Hiya says its Hiya AI Phone app acts like a personal assistant, saving time by screening unwanted phone calls, safeguarding against phone scams and taking notes during calls.
Picture the scene. You see a random number appear on your phone screen; reluctantly you answer it, only to find it’s an obvious scammer. People can often detect these, but the time spent fielding these calls is very annoying. According to Hiya, Americans spend 40 minutes each month screening 13 unwanted spam calls.
It gets worse with AI-enabled deepfakes, which can be very convincing. So much so that CEOs have been known to part with vast amounts of cash as a result.
These attacks are starting to happen more broadly, too. A survey of 2,000 US consumers conducted by Hiya and Censuswide in January found that in 2024, one in three Americans received at least one deepfake scam call. The impact is substantial: 45% of those targeted report falling victim, leading to financial loss, with 34% of those targeted losing an average of $7,200.
It is with this in mind that Hiya says its AI Phone app offers tools to streamline communication, detect synthetic voices and safeguard users from scams.
Features include intelligent call screening, which sees an AI assistant answer all unknown calls on your behalf, asking callers to state their name and purpose, and evaluates whether to connect them to you.
The app also detects scam calls in real-time to shield users from malicious hackers and impersonation attacks. It does this by analyzing your call audio in real-time, using advanced AI models trained to detect scam language and other indicators within conversations.
Detecting Deep Fakes
The Hiya App detects AI-generated voices and deepfakes, using advanced AI models trained to analyze your calls in real-time, detecting subtle patterns in the audio that indicate a voice is AI-generated or AI-modified. When an AI voice is identified, the app alerts you by vibrating your phone and displaying a warning.
According to Patchen Noelke, vice president at Hiya, the new app builds on the technology the firm already offers telecom carriers and consumers. “We’re taking it a step further by bringing these capabilities into the whole phone call experience,” he says.
Using the Hiya AI Phone app is pretty straight-forward, according to Noelke. “After downloading, users complete a quick onboarding process, including subscribing to the app. Once set up, they can access all features immediately, with no additional enablement required.”
But AI tools such as Hiya do need data to operate, which Noelke says the firm has kept in mind when creating the app. All call transcripts, summaries and voicemails are immediately deleted from Hiya’s services “seconds after they are downloaded onto the user’s device,” he says.
On the device, this data is encrypted and stored securely, ensuring that conversations remain private and fully under the user’s control, he says. At the same time, Hiya does not have access to this data and doesn’t use it for training unless a user explicitly reports and shares it. No personal or call data is stored on Hiya’s servers without the user’s clear consent, he adds.
Hiya AI Phone is free to download for Android and iPhone users, with premium features available via subscription for $9.99 per month. You can access a free two-week trial and cancel anytime through your app store settings.
