Microsoft opens up to Truecaller to help Windows Phone users pick out spam callers

Swedish startup Truecaller has announced a partnership with Microsoft that will see its Live Caller ID feature arrive for Windows Phone users.

Founded in 2009, Truecaller is a cross-platform call and contact management service, claiming more than 85 million users globally. It’s like an international crowdsourced telephone directory – everyone who registers with Truecaller can optionally open their contacts, including telephone number and name, to the community. These numbers are then made available to subsequent registrants, who can see the name of the caller regardless of whether they’re already saved to their own address book or not. The community also flag miscreants, including spammers and sales people, so you can see at a glance whether a call is worth your time.

Truecaller enables you to block unwanted calls, serving up access to its ‘Top Spammers’ list. There’s also a reverse number lookup option to try to establish who is behind a mystery number on your phone.

Though Truecaller was already available for Windows Phone, its caller ID functionality was restricted to missed calls, meaning you could only identify numbers retrospectively – not in real-time as the call was incoming. Now, Truecaller for Windows Phone has been brought into line with the Android and iOS incarnations.

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This means you can see if an incoming call is that annoying home insurance company, without having to answer. However, the new feature will only be available for Lumia devices running Windows Phone 8.1 Cyan and above.

The reason for this hitherto limitation on Windows Phone has been due to API restrictions from Microsoft’s end, but now the computing giant has opened things up exclusively to Truecaller to usher Live Caller ID into the fold globally.

The Live Caller ID feature will be hitting Truecaller for Windows Phone 8.1 Lumia devices  today.

➤ Truecaller [Windows Phone]