First released with the Pixel 9 series in 2024, Google’s suite of Scam Detection features might just be ready to make the jump to non-Pixel phones.
We’re specifically talking about Scam Detection for phone calls, which appears to be making its way to Samsung’s upcoming flagship series.
All existing Pixel devices can take advantage of Scam Detection, but the feature’s inner workings differ on some devices. On the Pixel 9 and Pixel 10 series, Scam Detection is more powerful, and it is powered by on-device Gemini Nano via AI Core. All other Pixel devices, including the Pixel 6, Pixel 7, and Pixel 8 series, boast Scam Detection too, but powered by Google’s proprietary on-device machine learning models.
There’s a chance that the Galaxy S26 series could use Gemini Nano for on-device AI tasks, and newly-found code strings in the Phone by Google app v206.0.857916353 suggest that one of those tasks could very well be Scam Detection. The development was highlighted by the folks over at Android Authority.
Samsung might ditch its own dialer
Credit:Â Android Authority
As previously spotted, the model numbers mentioned in the code strings are largely accepted to be S26 series model numbers.
- SM-S942 is the Galaxy S26
- SM-S947 is the Galaxy S26 Plus
- SM-S948 is the Galaxy S26 Ultra
In the short code snippet, the S26 series is grouped alongside Google’s own new flagships. We see codenames for the Pixel 9 family (Tokay, Komodo, Caiman, and Comet) as well as codenames for the Pixel 10 series (Mustang, Blazer, Frankel, and Rango).
Want to know the most telling part? All the codenames are being fed into “Sharpie,” which is the internal codename for the Scam Detection in the Phone by Google app.
The development also suggests that Samsung might be ready to ditch its own dialer in favor of Google’s. This would follow the South Korean tech giant’s 2024 move when it replaced Samsung Messages with Google Messages to streamline RCS.
Scam Detection might just be one of the main selling points of the upcoming series, with Samsung likely to mention the Ultra model’s reported ‘Privacy Display’ more often. Read about the software-powered feature below.
