EU AI Act: what it means for AI on the phone

AI phone assistants and voicebots generally do not fall into the high-risk class, but they are subject to the AI Act's transparency obligations: anyone interacting with an AI must be informed. For the phone this means the caller must learn at the start of the conversation that an AI system is speaking.

The regulation has been entering into force in stages since August 2024; the transparency obligations for AI systems such as phone assistants become binding on 2 August 2026. Companies using voicebots should have adapted their announcements and processes by then – violations can be punished with substantial fines.

Alongside the AI Act, the GDPR continues to apply: voice recordings and transcripts are personal data. Key points are a legal basis for processing, transparent information for callers, data minimisation and – decisive in practice – where processing takes place. If speech recognition runs on servers outside the EU, the legal situation quickly becomes complicated.

Empfango is built for these requirements from the ground up: every conversation starts with a fixed announcement about AI use and recording, speech processing runs on EU servers, call audio is not stored permanently and transcripts can be deleted at any time.