India is the company’s largest market, and call recording and transcription services for paid users have been made available by caller identity startup Truecaller. Premium users on iOS and Android will have access to the recording feature, which supports transcriptions into Hindi and English.
The company launched call recording for premium users in the United States in June 2023, and it is currently expanding the feature to India. The main difference is that in the United States, receivers would beep when a user started recording due to regulations. In India, that won’t be the case.
The Truecaller app’s dialer on Android devices will display a dedicated recording button. Truecaller will display a floating recording button for other dialers.
Because of Apple’s CallKit limitations, the procedure is a little different on iOS. After starting a call, you must open the Truecaller app and select the “Record a call” option found under the search tab if you wish to record either an incoming or outgoing call. To begin recording, you must manually combine the calls made by the app with another recording line.
After the call ends, the app analyzes the audio and notifies the user when the transcription is complete. The recordings on iOS are kept locally, though iCloud storage is an option.
Due to these outcomes, Truecaller’s stock price has decreased by over 15% so far this year.
Positively, there was an 11% increase in monthly active users to 374 million and a 12% increase in daily active users to 305 million. Over 70% of both user bases are based in India. The company’s user revenues increased by more than 20% in Q4, even though the decline in ad revenues was the primary cause of the overall revenue decline.
With features like call recording, the premium plan starts at ₹79 ($0.95) per month or ₹529 ($6.38) per year. Truecaller hopes that this will encourage customers to purchase the plan.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released recommendations last week for calling name presentation (CNAP), a caller ID service that sits atop cell networks. According to Truecaller, the service is not competitive.
Stockbroker Numis recently pointed out that Truecaller might not see any quick improvements in the Indian ad market in an investor note. The company is reportedly pushing for increased subscriber revenue.
“We think Truecaller has started spending extra to grow subscribers mainly in the US, and ad-funded users mainly in selected markets in LatAm & Africa,” Numis said in the note.
“Truecaller’s data & iOS product are now appropriately good to serve US subscribers well; US price points are high, and more of the US population than, say, that in India is used to paying monthly for services. Extra spend to quicken growth in ad-funded users in a market does not exceed revenue earned there.”
