Glossary

A short reference of the terms that come up around AI phone assistants — call screening, the call-forwarding plumbing that makes it work, the spam-and-scam landscape it deals with, and the adjacent ideas it's often confused with. Definitions are kept short and plain.

AI Phone Assistant

An AI phone assistant is a mobile app that uses AI to answer your incoming calls, screen unknown callers, and place outbound calls on your behalf. It works on top of your existing phone number, so you don't need a new line or SIM. OsmO is one example.

AI Call Screening

AI call screening is the use of AI to answer an incoming call, ask who's calling and why, and then decide what happens next — putting the caller through, taking a message, or blocking the call. It happens before your phone rings, so you only see the calls worth taking.

Spam Call

A spam call is an unsolicited mass call — usually marketing, lead-generation, or junk — placed without the recipient's consent. It's typically annoying rather than fraudulent, and follows known dialing patterns that databases and screening apps can spot.

Scam Call

A scam call is a fraudulent call whose goal is to steal money, login credentials, or personal identity — for example a fake IRS notice, a bank-fraud alert, or a tech-support con. Scam calls are a subset of unwanted calls but are deliberately deceptive, whereas spam calls are mostly just annoying.

Robocall

A robocall is an auto-dialed call that plays a pre-recorded message at scale, typically reaching millions of numbers cheaply over VoIP. It's a subset of spam calls; some robocalls are legal (school closures, appointment reminders) but most US complaints concern unsolicited marketing or outright scams.

Call Forwarding

Call forwarding is a carrier feature that automatically routes calls coming to your number to a different destination number. It's set up on the carrier network, not the handset, so the redirection happens before your phone rings.

Conditional Call Forwarding

Conditional call forwarding is a variant of call forwarding that only kicks in under specific conditions — typically when the call is unanswered, the line is busy, or the phone is unreachable — instead of forwarding every call. This is the mechanism OsmO uses on a user's existing phone number, so missed and unknown calls flow to the AI assistant while answered calls still ring through normally.

Caller ID Spoofing

Caller ID spoofing is when a caller deliberately falsifies the number that shows up on the recipient's caller ID, often to look local, familiar, or like the recipient's own number. It happens entirely on the caller's side and makes "trust the number" effectively meaningless on its own.

STIR/SHAKEN

STIR/SHAKEN is the caller-ID authentication framework used in the US and Canada to cryptographically sign and verify that a calling number actually belongs to the caller. It's intended to reduce spoofing, but isn't a complete fix — carriers implement it inconsistently and many scam calls still slip through, especially across international gateways.

Do Not Call Registry

The Do Not Call Registry is a US and Canada government list that legitimate telemarketers are required by law to avoid. It does reduce calls from law-abiding businesses, but it doesn't stop scammers or overseas robocallers, who simply ignore the list.

Voicemail Transcription

Voicemail transcription is the conversion of a recorded voicemail into readable text, typically using speech-to-text. It's faster to scan than to listen to, and the resulting transcript is searchable — so you can find that one message about a delivery without playing back every voicemail.

AI Receptionist

An AI receptionist is an AI that answers incoming calls for a business — greeting callers, qualifying them, routing them, and booking appointments — instead of a human front desk. It's the business-facing counterpart to a consumer AI phone assistant. Beside.com is one example.

Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is software that performs tasks for a user via voice or text — answering questions, scheduling, drafting messages, and so on. It's a broad category that includes general assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and ChatGPT as well as phone-specific assistants like OsmO.

Outbound AI Calling

Outbound AI calling is when AI places phone calls on a user's behalf — booking appointments, confirming reservations, chasing follow-ups, or waiting on hold in a customer-service queue — rather than only screening incoming calls. It turns a one-way screening tool into a two-way assistant.

Learn more: About OsmO · What is an AI phone assistant? · OsmO Blog