Deutsche Telekom, in partnership with AI-audio company ElevenLabs, has introduced the Magenta AI Call Assistant. The feature, announced at MWC 2026, is baked directly into phone calls in Germany, allowing users to activate it with a wake word for services like live language translation without needing a specific app or device.
The announcement raises privacy and usability concerns from experts, who question data collection on non-encrypted calls and the awkwardness of invoking an AI mid-conversation. There are also concerns about potential accent bias in the AI's synthetic voices.
Deutsche Telekom emphasizes the service is opt-in, requires consent from all parties on a call, and complies with EU data laws, with voice recordings not being saved. The initial rollout is limited to Germany, with plans to support up to 50 languages within a year.
Main Topics: Product Announcement (Magenta AI Call Assistant), Technology & Features, Privacy and Usability Concerns, Company Policies and Rollout Plans.
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 generating realistic voices from text, though its services have in the past been used to clone voices 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.
“It just sounds like a bad UX,” Ghosh says. “Say I'm talking to my mom, and in the middle of the call, I just start talking to an assistant, which is always listening. I feel like that is just a very weird experience.”
Ghosh has published research about accent bias in synthetic voices. Specifically, how voices created by ElevenLabs and Speechify can struggle to represent or understand many regional accents of people who don’t speak English as a first language. “I'm a big proponent of purpose-built AI systems,” Ghosh says. “This seems too general to just unleash on a population without safeguards.”
Deutsche Telekom says the services are opt-in, requiring users to accept the service before they can use it. The company also says voice recordings aren’t saved and fully comply with EU data protection laws. It hasn’t said whether the Magenta service will work for calls between customers on Deutsche Telekom and other networks.
“In each call, both parties have to agree on the usage,” wrote the Deutsche Telekom rep. “This transparency is very important for Deutsche Telekom.”
The Magenta service will be available in Germany only, starting sometime this year. Deutsche Telekom says support for translations in up to 50 languages is planned for the next 12 months. The company won’t say anything about plans to launch a similar service in other countries. It does have big, familiar-sounding ideas about what it wants its Magenta assistant to achieve, like letting you book a doctor’s appointment or restaurant mid-conversation.
Hopefully, there aren’t too many people or pets called Magenta in Germany, lest their names inadvertently trigger the AI assistant the way Amazon’s Alexa does.
Meridiano
