MegaFon: Russians participate in opinion polls through voice assistants

Also, subscribers are tired of offers of financial and legal services.

To protect against spam calls that were able to pass through operator filters, subscribers are increasingly using virtual assistants and intelligent call detection systems. According to mobile operator statistics, the categories of calls most disliked by subscribers include social surveys and offers of financial and legal services.

Virtual assistant Eva from MegaFon marks calls from unknown numbers on the phone screen: either the category or the name of a specific company is indicated. Over the course of a year, the number of users of the call marking functionality using Eve grew 55 times – to 8.2 million people.

Most often – in addition to spam calls – subscribers use the services of a virtual assistant when making calls about opinion polls, offers of financial services and law firms.

The overall growth in spam traffic has been 35 percent since the beginning of the year. Spammers’ tactics adapt to the blocking actions of operators. If previously one number could be used by them for a month, now such a number “lives” for several days or even hours.

“MegaFon was the first of the Big Four operators to offer virtual assistant services to its customers. “Eva saved our subscribers 416 thousand hours of personal time, which is equal to 50 years of life. We continue to work on new functionality, constantly improving its algorithms: from March to August of this year alone, the accuracy of caller identification increased by 38 percent,” said commercial director Pavel Tulubiev.