Scam Detection is the feature that listens in while you’re on a call and pops a warning if the person on the other end starts behaving like a scammer. Pixel owners have had it for a while. Galaxy S26 owners got it earlier this year. Now it looks like vivo is third in line to get Scam Detection.
Android Authority pulled apart version 234.0.9 of the Phone by Google app and found vivo’s name sitting right alongside Samsung’s and the Pixel codenames, next to references to “Sharpie” – Google’s internal name for Scam Detection. That’s not an announcement, just code. Teardowns show work in progress, and plenty of features found this way get delayed or quietly dropped.
Which vivo phones? The X500 series is the likeliest first stop since it hasn’t launched, though whether the X300 gets it later is anyone’s guess. Also unclear: whether vivo builds it into its own dialer the way Samsung did, or switches over to Phone by Google entirely.
Worth knowing how the thing works before you worry about it listening. On Pixel 9 and newer it runs on Gemini Nano, the processing stays on your phone and neither the audio nor a transcript is sent to Google, and you have to switch it on yourself. Given that INTERPOL put impersonation fraud among the biggest contributors to more than $400 billion in global fraud losses last year, having a few more phones flagging these calls isn’t a bad thing.
