2025 Telecom Predictions: Voice Biometrics Key to Combating AI Deepfakes and Enhancing Network Security

2024 was another eventful year of growth and challenges in the telecom industry. As we begin 2025, the battle against robocall bad actors remains front and center. Armed with advanced artificial intelligence (AI), scammers are as bold as ever, deploying increasingly sophisticated scams to steal from the public, undermine trust in the voice channel and exploit network vulnerabilities.

The lessons from 2024 are clear: unwanted robocall campaigns, including AI-generated deepfakes and disinformation campaigns, make it difficult for Americans to distinguish between realistic scams and legitimate calls. With AI at their disposal, scammers can not only clone voices by replicating the critical qualities of a voice - volume, pace, tone, pitch and enunciation - but can also mimic background noises, such as traffic or office chatter, adding a greater layer of authenticity to their scams.

Despite bad actors' AI advancements, this past year was notable for the strong telecom industry efforts in developing solutions capable of thwarting scammers, including voice biometrics and AI call and text spam detection. In 2025, continued action, and adoption of these advanced solutions, is needed from the telecom industry to fight robocall bad actors that leverage AI security gaps.

Harnessing AI Key to Defending Against Bad Actors

The past year marked a turning point in how bad actors weaponized AI. Through deepfake impersonations of elected officials, family members and business executives, the technology was consistently used to exploit human trust.

The most dramatic example of this was when President Biden's voice was spoofed in February for a robocall that told New Hampshire voters to forgo their primary. It wasn't the only one. In June, an Arizona woman testified before the US Senate about an AI robocall that mimicked her daughter's voice in severe distress during a fake kidnapping scheme. Similarly, a Philadelphia attorney received a call from an AI-generated voice of his son, who falsely claimed he was in jail after being in a car accident that injured a pregnant woman.

The telecom industry begins 2025 more strongly positioned to level the playing field against scammers and harness AI for good. Increased research and development on AI's potential to restore trust in communications, better analyze call traffic activity, and protect consumers from the growing use of nefarious AI will yield solutions that are ready to be adopted this year.

TNS' AI Labs Leads the Way in AI R&D

TNS' AI Labs is a pioneering research initiative that has been working diligently on generative, predictive and discriminative AI technologies. Led by TNS Communications Market Chief Data Officer Greg Bohl, the AI Labs team initially focused on two core solutions essential to the telecom industry's fight against robocall bad actors: voice biometrics and AI call and text spam detection.

Voice biometrics uses real-time AI to identify whether the voice on the other end of an incoming call is artificially generated. It serves as a call screener by analyzing callers' voices, tone and diction to determine if the voice is real or a bad actor deploying AI for fraudulent schemes.

Meanwhile, AI call and text spam detection enlists AI models to prevent machine-generated text messages and calls from reaching the intended recipient.

These solutions can be leveraged by carriers of all sizes to help mitigate the damage done by robocall bad actors. Broader adoption is essential to maximizing their impact.

Robocall bad actors' generative AI attacks will continue to evolve as they deploy more sophisticated attacks to yield greater paydays. The only way for the telecom industry to combat them is by harnessing AI for its own use.

Greg Bohl is Chief Data Officer at TNS with specific responsibility for TNS' Communications Market solutions.

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