Telegram is introducing voice calls to its messaging app, offering audio calling that uses artificial intelligence to increase quality on an ongoing basis, as well as end-to-end encryption for security.
According to TechCrunch, Telegram was founded by Pavel Durov, a Russian entrepreneur who was the founder of VKontakte, Russia’s Facebook. He was ousted from that company in 2014 and has since worked on developing Telegram, which has 100 million monthly users and 350,000 new users joining per day.
While the app might be a bit late in offering this latest feature, it plans to make its voice calling stand out through its use of AI. The technology uses a variety of call information, such as network speed, ping times and packet loss percentage to optimize each call and improve the quality of future calls.
In addition, users can opt to use a “low data” call, where they can save on a data plan at the expense of poorer call quality, as well as limit their incoming calls by only allowing people in their contacts to contact them.
And its end-to-end encryption enables the feature to be used safely and securely, with the framework for Telegram’s “Secret Chat” feature adapted for this new introduction. Two people making a call over Telegram will be able to compare four emojis as a key exchange to ensure that their call is encrypted.
“Telegram Calls are built upon the time-tested, end-to-end encryption of Telegram’s Secret Chats. The key verification UI we came up with in 2013 to protect against man-in-the-middle attacks served well for Telegram (and for other apps that adopted it), but for calls, we needed something easier. That’s why we’ve improved the key exchange mechanism,” the company said in a blog post.