PIONEER EDGE NEWS SERVICE
When people can speak to AI through a phone call, companionship is what they ask for most. Companionship and emotional support account for 22.8 per cent of all queries on AI On Call, the service run by Delhi NCR-based technology company blackNgreen (BNG). That is more than one in five queries.
The data comes from live operator networks. AI On Call handles approximately 60 million queries every month and is live in more than 24 countries. It can reach about 180 million subscribers through telecom networks. Users spend an average of around 28 minutes on the service each month. The queries give BNG insight into the everyday needs of subscribers.
Education and learning is the second largest category, at 14.5 per cent of queries. News and current affairs follows at 12.5 per cent, and sports and entertainment at 12.3 per cent. Telecom and account services make up 10.8 per cent.
Three further categories cover health, farming and money. Health and medical queries account for 9.2 per cent. Agriculture and farming stands at 5.4 per cent, and financial guidance at 4.3 per cent. Other topics make up the remaining 8.2 per cent.
AI On Call addresses a major gap in the digital ecosystem. Around 3.4 billion people, about 40 per cent of the world’s population, still do not use mobile internet, according to the GSMA. Handset affordability remains one of the biggest barriers.
“Most AI today is built for people who are already online. We are building for the person who has never owned a smartphone, and that is now the centre of our product strategy. A phone call is the one interface everyone already knows how to use,” said the co-founder and CEO, blackNgreen, Rahul Gupta.
The service is localised for each market. BNG combines telecom expertise with capabilities across large language models (LLMs), automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS). This lets it localise AI for new languages, adapt to operator requirements and comply with local regulations in each market. Gupta said the company’s 18 years inside telecom networks let it take AI to callers in local languages and go live in a new market within days.
BNG also runs AI PA (Personal Assistant), an AI-powered voice assistant that answers calls on behalf of subscribers when they are unavailable. It is designed for small-business owners and busy professionals. The service currently handles more than 18 per cent of subscriber calls and is planned to expand to around 18 countries over the next 12 months.
BNG was founded in 2008. It serves customers across 80+ countries and handles more than a trillion transactions a month. The company is stepping up hiring across technology, sales and business development to take its AI products to more markets. The technology team is expected to grow by 65 to 100 per cent over the next 12 months, and about three-quarters of the new positions will be in India.
