This AI Agent Is Ready to Serve, Mid-Phone Call
Deutsche Telekom, the German mobile operator that is also a majority shareholder of T-Mobile in the United States, is introducing an AI assistant to its phone line. The result of a partnership with AI-audio company ElevenLabs, the feature is called Magenta AI Call Assistant. It will only be available in Germany for now and does not require a specific app or smartphone. The AI sound assistant will be integrated into the phone call, offering services such as live translation to anyone who chooses to participate.
Magenta AI Call Assistant was announced at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona by Mati Staniszewski, co-founder of ElevenLabs, and Abdu Mudesir, member of the product and technology board of Deutsche Telekom. Magenta Assistant works when someone uses the wake words “Hey Magenta” during a call. Then the assistant can be asked to translate languages live, reference a user’s calendar information to find availability, or use a map service to find nearby places.
ElevenLabs is an AI company known for its voice cloning of podcast hosts and US presidents. Staniszewski posted about the Magenta service on LinkedIn, highlighting efforts to make the feature available without the need to download an app.
“During a phone call, the assistant is activated by the wake word ‘Hey Magenta,'” a Deutsche Telekom representative wrote in an email response to WIRED. “It only listens to the question you ask. If you want to ask something else later in the conversation, you have to enable it again.”
Language translation AI services already exist, but are mostly exclusive to specific devices. Apple offers a live translation feature on many of its devices, as does Samsung. Google offers Voice Translate on its Pixel 10 devices, which even uses AI to imitate the sound of your voice. The appeal of Magenta, both companies hope, is that the functionality is independent of hardware and software and feels more like a natural extension of a phone call.
This ease of use raises a myriad of privacy concerns, like the introduction of AI assistants into unencrypted phone calls, and how it opens users up to all kinds of data collection.
Avijit Ghosh, technical researcher in AI policy at AI community platform Hugging Face, is concerned about the use of AI assistants in an unencrypted communications service. He’s also skeptical that the assistant will actually be useful because using it requires the user to call it in the middle of a phone call.
