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Reliance Jio launches Call Agent for 500 million subscribers, no app required

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

At its 49th AGM on June 19, Reliance Industries unveiled Jio Call Agent, an AI assistant embedded in the Jio network that joins phone calls via voice command and is expected to reach all 500-plus million Jio subscribers later in 2026.

Reliance Jio launches Call Agent for 500 million subscribers, no app required

At its 49th Annual General Meeting on June 19, 2026, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani announced Jio Call Agent, an AI assistant wired directly into the Jio mobile network. No app download and no new phone number is needed. Users trigger it by saying "Hey Jio" during a live call.

What happened

The AGM, held in Mumbai, was the platform for several AI product announcements, with Jio Call Agent the most prominent. Per TechCrunch's reporting on the event, the service can transcribe conversations, identify up to ten distinct speakers on a conference call, generate summaries, and carry out tasks on the user's behalf. Those tasks include booking a cab, ordering food, making restaurant reservations, and adding participants to an active conference call.

Because the agent is embedded in the network layer rather than delivered through a third-party application, it becomes available automatically to Jio's subscriber base on existing SIM cards. The company said the feature will support all Indian regional languages. A commercial launch is expected later in 2026 but no firm date was given at the AGM, per TechCrunch.

The announcement came alongside several related product introductions. Reliance unveiled Jio TeleFrame, a voice-first agentic AI platform designed to surface contextual information and take actions on behalf of users, with the company stating that the system logs every action it takes and requires explicit user consent before processing any payments. Reliance also introduced five vertical AI apps spanning personal assistance, small-business productivity, healthcare, education, and agriculture, all slated to support 22 Indian languages and available to existing Jio customers.

Ambani framed the push in national terms. "India should not be a mere consumer of AI created elsewhere. It must become a creator, adopter, and a global leader in AI," he said at the meeting, per TechCrunch.

Why it matters

The scale is the story. Five hundred million subscribers represents one of the largest potential rollouts of an on-network AI assistant anywhere. Competing products typically ask users to install a separate app or sign up for a new service. Jio Call Agent skips that step, which removes a significant adoption barrier. If even a fraction of the subscriber base uses the feature regularly, the aggregate usage would be substantial.

The approach also illustrates a distinct path from the dominant U.S. and Chinese model deployment patterns. Reliance is not building an AI product to sell to enterprises or to a narrow developer audience. It is wrapping AI capability around an existing telco relationship at consumer scale, in a country where many users conduct significant parts of their digital lives through voice calls rather than apps.

The multilingual commitment matters in the same way. Supporting 22 Indian languages natively addresses a real access gap that English-first AI products cannot close. Reliance has framed this as a deliberate design choice rather than a future add-on.

What the company has not yet disclosed is which AI model or models power Jio Call Agent under the hood. Reliance signed agreements with both Google and Meta for AI infrastructure last year, per earlier TechCrunch coverage, but no model attribution appeared in the AGM announcements.

What to watch next

Two questions define whether the Jio Call Agent becomes a landmark deployment or stays a staged announcement. First, the hard commercial launch date and the rollout pace across Jio's subscriber tiers. Second, whether Reliance discloses its model partnerships for the call agent specifically, which would clarify how the product relates to the broader Jio AI infrastructure built with Google and Meta.

Sources