Deutsche Telekom, the German mobile provider that is also the majority stakeholder of T-Mobile in the US, is introducing an AI assistant into its phone line. The result of a partnership with the AI-audio company ElevenLabs, the feature is called Magenta AI Call Assistant. It will be available in Germany only, for now, and doesn’t require an app or a specific smartphone. The audible AI assistant will be baked into the phone call, offering services like live language translation to anyone who chooses to opt in.
Magenta AI Call Assistant was announced at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona by ElevenLabs cofounder Mati Staniszewski and Abdu Mudesir, executive board member for product and technology at Deutsche Telekom. The Magenta assistant works when one person 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 alike. Staniszewski posted about the Magenta service on LinkedIn, highlighting the effort to make the feature available without needing to download an app.
“In a phone call, the assistant gets activated by the ‘Hey Magenta’ wake-up word,” wrote a representative for Deutsche Telekom in an email response to WIRED. “It listens only to the question you ask. If you want to ask something else later in the conversation, you have to activate it again.”
Language translation AI services already exist, but have mostly been exclusive to specific devices. Apple offers a Live Translation feature on many of its devices, as does Samsung. Google has Voice Translate available on its Pixel 10 devices, which even uses AI to mimic the sound of your voice. The appeal of Magenta, both companies hope, is that the feature is hardware- and software-agnostic, and that it feels more like a natural extension of a phone call.
That ease of use opens up a myriad of privacy concerns, like introducing AI assistants in non-encrypted telephone calls, and how it opens users up to all sorts of data collection.
Avijit Ghosh, a technical AI policy researcher at the AI community platform Hugging Face, has concerns about using AI assistants in a non-encrypted communications service. He is also skeptical of how useful the assistant will actually be, as using it requires the user to call on it in the middle of a phone call.
Read the full article here