Equal AI to launch India’s first AI call assistant on Oct 2 to answer unknown phone calls

Hyderabad-based tech start-up Equal today announced the launch of Equal AI - India’s first AI call assistant – to be rolled out on October 2.

Equal AI will be available to Android users in Delhi NCR starting October 2 and can be downloaded for free from the Google Play Store. The company will roll out the product in phases in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, and IOS support will follow soon.

“We wanted to build an AI assistant for India. The idea is not to simply block a caller without trying to know who is calling, or without telling the user who the caller is and why is he calling,” Keshav Reddy, founder and CEO, Equal told Fortune India. The AI call assistant, or Equal AI, will be a free of cost service, but the other functionalities on the app will be on payment/subscription basis, the company pointed out. The company is targeting one million daily active users for Equal AI by mid-2026.

Explaining about how Equal AI functions, Reddy said, “The Equal AI answers the calls, and if it is important, urgent or something relevant, then it passes it on to me, the user. One gets many unknown calls in a day, including spams, scams, deliveries, and telemarketing, etc. One gets interrupted and irritated but still, there is that one call, which one eventually picks up. Generally, people wait for the call to be over and look into who the caller is, on the currently available apps. But with just the name on the caller app, there is no context. So that is the thesis. But we are solving this pain point differently.”

“When any phone call comes, the Equal AI system picks it up for you. The user gets a notification that a live call is going on. The app takes over your screen. AI speaks to the person, but you can decide to instruct the AI to convey a message, or alternatively you can pick up the call. It is up to you,” he added.

“But if you are not picking it up and missing it, it will take up the message and pass it on to you in form of summary/recording to be reviewed later. We create a very nice summary for you. And if it is urgent, it will actually connect the call to you. So, it screens the call and connects the call if it is important,” Reddy said explaining the features of the AI.

Reddy says the idea is to make the call experience seamless for the user. “The app not only sees what is happening but also takes action. The beauty of the system is that if I click ‘leave at gate’ as an instruction, it instructs the caller to do so in voice command. That is the innovation we have made. It is a live conversational AI. It is the new interface. You are not talking to the person who is calling. You are messaging the AI to speak,” Reddy explains.

The launch comes at a time when scams like digital arrests, drug in courier scams, and multiple other frauds have become rampant duping innocent citizens especially the older people of their life-long earnings. “More than 60% of Indians receive three or more spam calls every day2, and in the first half of 2024 alone, TRAI logged over 7.9 lakh complaints against unregistered telemarketers. Despite measures like DND registries, celebrity-driven awareness caller tunes, and caller ID apps, spam, scam, and unwanted transactional calls continue to erode trust and productivity,” Equal said in a release.

“Equal AI goes beyond being a caller ID or screener to deliver proactive call management, giving users the freedom to focus, enjoy their day, and step in only when it truly matters,” the release added.

It may be noted that the launch of Equal AI is first step in the company’s larger vision. “The company plans to build an AI assistant capable of handling everyday consumer needs, from shopping and financial services to housing and routine tasks. The vision is to create an assistant used daily by hundreds of millions of Indians, built natively for India, with Indian consumers in mind, while keeping them firmly in control,” the company said in a release.

Founded in 2022 by Keshav Reddy and Rajeev Ranjan and joined by Krishna Prasad in 2024, Equal is backed by marquee investors such as Prosus, Blume, DST Global Partners, Tomales Bay Capital, Valiant Capital, Binny Bansal, Karan Adani, Kunal Shah, Kunal Bahl, Nikhil Kamath and Parth Jindal. Equal is India’s largest data sharing platforms accounting for 1.2 billion plus transactions yearly, 95 million plus unique Indian users and 350 plus enterprise customers.

It offers fully integrated suite of data sharing products like BFSI tech solutions powered by account aggregation and AI driven analytics employee verification across industry and company sizes, and identity verification, among others.