Truecaller seeks to enlarge foothold in Kenyan digital space

Recently, Truecaller announced a number of new and evolving features, to be implemented and applied into the Kenyan ecosystem. The new features are heralded as attributes to the Truecaller platform, enabling the platform to better serve users, and to tighten the threshold of security against spam in an overall context.

One of the new features is, Truecaller inbox, the new SMS feature combines texting capabilities, syncing it with powerful spam identification to stop spammers entering one’s inbox with junk messages. This would intentionally allow for more seamless conversation between people, paving the way for the next feature. The next feature being, group chat. It is often a recurring experience when one is added to a group chat, with hundreds of other numbers, without any way of blocking or declining to be added into that group chat. Truecaller now allows the user to decline and accept group invites at a much larger, and more seamless level.

Furthermore, the group chat feature comes hand in hand with another feature Truecaller is pioneering, called hidden number. Hidden number, is where group numbers are automatically hidden in group chats, yours included. Unless they have your number saved in their phonebook, or they make a request to see your number, which is facilitated by Truecaller itself.

As with any digital entity seeking to penetrate to new heights in the smartphone and app world, Truecaller have introduced free high quality audio calls. The internet based calling feature is interlinked with call waiting, so that the user can talk with interruption free HD calls. Through the audio calls, this would enable call recording. Allowing to help report harassment and fraudulent calls.

Kenya, being a country with an ever expanding digital footprint, still has a large population of people, that are offline. Hence, the Truecaller platform will also incorporate those with feature phones, since 40% of the Kenyan market use feature phones. The gap between the online and offline world will be bridges, as caller ID and spam protection will be put to use even when offline.

Truecaller is on the hinges of launching their developer program in Kenya. Backing this up, Mr. Priyam Bose was at hand to say that they are aiming for safety, trust and efficiency. This in turn would help 3^rd party startups and developers grow their products and apps in the ecosystem by leveraging on the truecaller platform, such as little cab for example. Therefore allowing the building of more meaningful partnerships.

Truecaller SDK, a new and upcoming initiative, allows for instant verification. In that, it revolves around trusted mobile identity with user profiles mapped to mobile numbers. With no OTP required, avoiding of typos because users do not need to key in their mobile numbers, no manual efforts, auto capture user consent based profile, with no waiting time, resulting in quicker user activation.

Truecaller is on the fringes of breaking new boundaries on its growth chart, with 33million users in Africa, and 17m spam SMS in Kenya every month, the company is seeking to grow their operations and establish a foothold in this rapidly fluctuating digital landscape.