This AI agent is ready to serve, just a phone call away

Deutsche Telekom, The German mobile phone provider that is also the majority owner of T-Mobile in the United States presentation AI assistant on his phone line. As a result of the partnership with AI-audio Eleven laboratoriesThis feature is called Magenta AI Call Assistant. It will only be available in Germany for now, and does not require a specific app or smartphone. The audible AI assistant will be integrated into the phone call, offering services such as live language translation to anyone who opts in.

Magenta AI Call Assistant was announced in Mobile World Congress 2026 In Barcelona by ElevenLabs co-founder Matej Staniszewski and Abdo Medesir, Member of the Executive Board for Products and Technology at Deutsche Telekom. Magenta Assistant works when one person uses the wake words “Hey Magenta” during a call. The Assistant can then be asked to translate languages ​​directly, consult the user’s calendar information for availability, or use the mapping service to find nearby places.

ElevenLabs is an artificial intelligence company known for its voice cloning Podcast hosts and Presidents of the United States both. Staniszevsky Posted about Magenta service on LinkedIn, highlighting efforts to make the feature available without having to download an app.

Abdo Medeser, Member of the Executive Board for Products and Technology at Deutsche Telekom, unveiled the Magenta AI communication assistant at MWC 2026.

Courtesy of Norbert Ettermann/Deutsche Telekom

“In a phone call, the assistant is activated by the wake word ‘Hey Magenta,’” a Deutsche Telekom representative wrote in an email response to WIRED. “It only listens to the question you ask. If you want to ask something else later in the conversation, you have to activate it again.”

AI services for language translation already exist, but have often been exclusive to certain devices. Apple offers a Direct translation Advantage on Many of its deviceslike Is it Samsung?. Google has a voice translation service available on Pixel 10 deviceswhich uses artificial intelligence to mimic your voice. Both companies hope the appeal of Magenta is that the feature doesn’t depend on hardware and software, and that it feels like a natural extension of a phone call.

This ease of use opens up a myriad of privacy concerns, such as introducing AI assistants into unencrypted phone calls, and how that opens users up to all kinds of data collection.

Avijit Ghosh is a technical AI policy researcher at the AI ​​Community Platform Face hugginghas concerns about the use of AI assistants in an unencrypted communications service. It also questions how useful the Assistant actually is, since using it requires the user to call it in the middle of a phone call.