MIUI prepares to automatically recognize and change ringtone for phone calls from food delivery vendors

MIUI by Xiaomi continues to see regular and active development from the company. Unlike other larger OEMs, Xiaomi gives enthusiast users a chance to try out some of these features through beta releases, before the features make their way to stable releases. For instance, previous MIUI Betas have showcased features such as additional Screen Cast features, Dark Mode Scheduling, new MiLanPro font, an under-keyboard shortcut bar, dual Wi-Fi acceleration, and more. These betas also offer glimpses of features in active development, so we can take an educated guess on what we can see from Xiaomi in the future. The latest MIUI 10 Beta 9.8.20 for the Chinese region indicates that Xiaomi is working on automatically recognizing incoming calls from service vendors, and then ringing the call with a separate ringtone for easier identification.

An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by Xiaomi in a future build.

The following strings have been spotted in the Settings app on MIUI 10 Beta 9.8.20:

<string name="intelligent_recognition_item_summary">Identify incoming calls made by service vendors (e.g. food delivery) and use separate ringtones for them</string>

<string name="intelligent_recognition_item_title">Identify services</string>

While these strings were spotted in the Chinese MIUI Beta ROM, we do believe that the feature will make its way to India, eventually. In the past, Xiaomi has partnered with various third-party service vendors in India to localize MIUI and make it more useful to the Indian audience, and a feature like this will be a perfect fit for India. Food delivery services like Zomato, Swiggy and Uber Eats are huge in India, especially in urban areas, thanks to their deep discount models and service discovery methods. A lot of customers, ranging from working individuals to partying teenagers, rely on these services to deliver food to them in a jiffy. A deeper level of integration in MIUI with these services will play out well for the end-users.

How will MIUI know when these service vendors would call, especially when the delivery executives change every time? Our best guess on this is that Xiaomi probably envisages a scenario where these service vendors would share mobile numbers of their delivery executives to Xiaomi. MIUI already includes localized app usage tracking for Digital Wellbeing functionality, so this could be used to determine when a customer is expecting delivery from a particular service. A call from a delivery executive with this connected service could then be recognized, and a different ringtone could be applied to alert the user about the caller and the purpose of the call. This is conjecture, admittedly, so the functionality could very well play out differently when the feature is fully developed.

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