Smartphones

Lanx

Lanx

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Kharzette said:
It is this: Chris Talbot / Phosh Anti-Spam · GitLab

It isn't perfect. If you choose to silence the bad calls, the screen still lights up and you still have the opportunity to answer it.

If you choose to hang up right away, you get about a quarter of a second of ring before the program kicks in and hangs up on them. Neither are ideal.
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i asked gemini for an ai agent for linux phone, complicated
While there isn't a single "plug-and-play" app that mimics the Google Pixel's AI call screening exactly on Linux mobile (Phosh), you can achieve a similar workflow by layering a few tools. Since you're already familiar with Phosh Anti-Spam, you know it works by intercepting the DBus signal to gnome-calls.
To go beyond simple hanging up and move into "AI screening," here is the current landscape for 2026:

1. The "Contact App" Approach: GNOME Calls + Plugins​

The primary call handler on Phosh is GNOME Calls. It uses a plugin-based architecture (libpeas).


  • The Status: There is no official "AI Screen" button yet, but the Ubuntu Touch/Lomiri ecosystem and some PostmarketOS community members have been experimenting with Whisper.cpp (for STT) and local LLMs to process incoming call audio.
  • The Hack: Some users are routing calls through a SIP/VoIP provider (like Twilio or JMP.chat) that supports programmable voice. You can set up a "vocal menu" or an AI agent on the provider side that screens the call before it even hits your Linux phone's Phosh Anti-Spam filter.

2. Emerging AI Apps for Linux Mobile​

If you want something that runs locally on your device:
  • Kai 9000: This is a newer open-source AI assistant (available on GitHub) that has a Linux version. It is designed to execute "Tools." While it doesn't hook into the modem directly yet, developers are working on using it as a "Heartbeat" service that can monitor notifications and potentially interface with the audio stream of an active call to transcribe and suggest replies.


  • Phosh Anti-Spam (Advanced Config): You can technically modify the Phosh Anti-Spam script. Instead of just hangup, you can point it to a script that answers the call and plays an audio file (using pacmd or pw-play), then records the response for you to review via a notification.

3. DIY "AI Screener" Workflow​

If you're comfortable with some "mechanical guy" tinkering, this is the most effective setup right now:
  1. Phosh Anti-Spam: Keeps your "Spam" list and "Non-Contacts" blocked or silenced.


  2. JMP.chat / Cheogram: Use a SIP number for public use. These services allow you to bridge your calls to an XMPP bot.
  3. The Bot: You can point that bot to a local or API-based LLM. When a stranger calls, the bot answers, asks "Who is this?", transcribes the answer, and sends you an XMPP message (which shows up as a standard Phosh notification). You then decide whether to "patch through" the call to your actual dialer.

Summary Table​

SolutionEffortFunctionality
Phosh Anti-SpamLowHard block/ignore only.
SIP + AI BotHighTrue AI screening with transcription.
Kai 9000MediumLocal AI assistant (requires manual integration).
GNOME Calls Dev BranchHighExperimental built-in "Answer & Record" features.
Pro-Tip: If you're printing 3D brackets for your tech gear, you might consider a small "desk dock" setup for your phone. Some users are running more powerful AI screening scripts by keeping the phone docked and using the desktop-class CPU power of the PinePhone Pro or Librem 5 to handle the STT/LLM processing without killing the battery.
 
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Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

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Kharzette said:
Mum's robo calls are getting so bad now that they are calling till 9pm. I've managed to set it up so that if the caller is not in her contacts it goes straight to voicmail (which we have no idea how to configure), but there's still this BEEP BEEP BEEP call ended sound that is almost louder than the ringtone.

So I've got to work on how to get rid of that. Another annoying thing is the filtered calls still go into the recent calls list. I'd rather the phone just didn't respond at all silently but it is better than nothing.

The "recent" calls list is getting super slow now because of all the scamcalls bloating the list up. Going to have to figure out how to clear the list.

Looks like all the phosh stuff is in /usr/share/sounds/phosh/stereo and the offending sound is phone-hangup.oga. Changed that to a 0 length file and problem solved.

Recent call nuke complete! Blast everything in .local/share/calls/ and reboot. I figured closing and reopening "calls" would do it, but there's some systemd thing that handles the calls database of course.
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Perhaps I'm missing something, is there a reason you won't just get like a conventional phone? Does everything need to be overly complicated? I used to really get into the android roll your own rom scene but I got tired of fiddling with a phone.

I have an older S22 Ultra, unfortunately it's new enough Samsung keeps pushing AI bullshit on it but I also keep 'do not disturb' on between 10PM and 10:30AM , if you are not my wife or my mother in law you go to VM. Period.

I am also getting robo calls, but they go to VM. I'm guessing the rise in robo calls is the looming mid-terms.
 
Kharzette

Kharzette

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Kajiimagi said:
Perhaps I'm missing something, is there a reason you won't just get like a conventional phone? Does everything need to be overly complicated? I used to really get into the android roll your own rom scene but I got tired of fiddling with a phone.

I have an older S22 Ultra, unfortunately it's new enough Samsung keeps pushing AI bullshit on it but I also keep 'do not disturb' on between 10PM and 10:30AM , if you are not my wife or my mother in law you go to VM. Period.

I am also getting robo calls, but they go to VM. I'm guessing the rise in robo calls is the looming mid-terms.
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It has been a struggle. Mum is very averse to technology. I've had similar struggles with TVs, she doesn't deal well with the "smart" stuff.

I got her a flip phone for awhile but it died because of a very common problem with the hinge. It was a bad phone but it kinda worked. She mostly ignored the menus and any "features" of the phone and just got her paper address book out and manually dialed people. I had all her contacts imported but she just couldn't get how to use it to call people no matter how many times I showed her how.

When it seemed like a touch screen was somewhat inevitable I decided to get something I had full control over. The idea being I could program the interface to be simple and easy. I had good luck with this approach on the TV side with a libre le potato SBC running her old tv with a heavily customized kodi. I never really got around to doing it for the phone though.

I did grab the source to the phone app and worked on boosting the size of some of the icons but some crisis or other interrupted that and I never got back to it.

The main problems we are having with the current phone would be the same on any other crapple or droid, mainly handling it with the screen on unwittingly mashing random things on the screen.

Another motivation for going with linux is that I don't have much experience with phones. I hate them and haven't had one since an iphone 3G I got purely for work (we were working on a game called Elysian Fields or something). The last phone I had that I liked was an imate jam running windows.

Linux audio sure does suck though. I should have expected trouble as I've always had struggles with it on my main pc. It doesn't deal well with audio sources appearing and vanishing, like when your hdmi or displayport monitor goes to sleep or gets turned off for the night.
 
Lanx

Lanx

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Kharzette said:
The main problems we are having with the current phone would be the same on any other crapple or droid, mainly handling it with the screen on unwittingly mashing random things on the screen.
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thats user error, and to an extent your fault

when my mom got an iphone, i only put phone sms safari youtube and whatsapp on the front page, everything else i either pushed to the other windows or the folder

and this has been my life ever since i was 9, when we got a vcr, i was one of those kids that put masking tape on buttons like "program"

you know who got this right? sony
96ebfaed0173168ea1d598b375ee7a22.jpg


look at these remotes, what does sony do? they put all the other button behind a sliding door
 
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Denamian

Denamian

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You might want to look into decent but not crap low end android phone and put a replacement launcher on it. They make ones specifically for seniors. Configure it and lock it so you have to actually try to make changes to the layout.
 
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Kharzette

Kharzette

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Void said:
I don't remember the start of this tale, but what about a land line and a simple home phone?
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We started there, but the disasters became more and more frequent.

Will you donate to support our brave firefighters? etc... etc... etc... all scammers that have a vulnerable old people list. They call 10-20 times a day.

The worst was when a humana insurance person called her while I was asleep and switched everything over to them, promising all kinds of crazy stuff. Nobody within 100 miles takes that insurance here, but they didn't bother to mention that. Took alot of pain to get that mess untangled.

One major problem with a landline is that she is a smoker and probably outside the majority of the day puffing her life away, so we'd always miss important calls. I was thinking a cell would fix this but she just won't take it with her. I tried sticky notes on the door TAKE YOUR PHONE and about 10 other things but eventually just gave up.

Now if there's a situation like "the hospital will call you to schedule an appointment" I tell them flat out that will never work and we have to do something different.
 
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Kharzette

Kharzette

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Denamian said:
You might want to look into decent but not crap low end android phone and put a replacement launcher on it. They make ones specifically for seniors. Configure it and lock it so you have to actually try to make changes to the layout.
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Every "senior" phone I could find would only work on old analog connections. I found this out the hard way when her flip phone broke, I bought her a big button simple one off amazon and it wouldn't work with anything in the area.
 
BrutulTM

BrutulTM

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The fake charities are rage inducing. Once you donate to one you are getting a thousand calls. I think I convinced my mom that she should never donate money to anyone who calls her. If you want to donate money, pick a charity and give what you want to give. Preferably a local one that won't fill up your mailbox for the next 10 years. I can't get her to stop answering the phone though, or to just hang up on them. She always listens until they stop talking and then says "Thank you for calling but I don't think I'm interested in that today.".

She has also nearly fallen for multiple scams where someone on the phone nearly got her to give them her bank account or credit card number
 
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Denamian

Denamian

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Kharzette said:
Every "senior" phone I could find would only work on old analog connections. I found this out the hard way when her flip phone broke, I bought her a big button simple one off amazon and it wouldn't work with anything in the area.
Click to expand...

I'm talking about a standard smartphone, but replacing the launcher (think desktop and app drawer) with one geared towards simplicity. It's a trivial thing to do and there is no need to root the phone. Samsung phones even have an easy mode to simplify things.

Since you've mentioned accidental touches when handling the phone are a problem, you can disable tap to wake and lift to wake, so the screen doesn't come on until she hits the power button. Android is even built on the Linux kernel, so I figure that'd be right up your alley.
 
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Kharzette

Kharzette

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BrutulTM said:
The fake charities are rage inducing. Once you donate to one you are getting a thousand calls. I think I convinced my mom that she should never donate money to anyone who calls her. If you want to donate money, pick a charity and give what you want to give. Preferably a local one that won't fill up your mailbox for the next 10 years. I can't get her to stop answering the phone though, or to just hang up on them. She always listens until they stop talking and then says "Thank you for calling but I don't think I'm interested in that today.".

She has also nearly fallen for multiple scams where someone on the phone nearly got her to give them her bank account or credit card number
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I am not sure if this is some kind of reddit legend but I read that most of them are some indian guy that drifts between college towns, talking kids into working for him in a rented house full of rented furniture, then vanishes with the money in a week or so, moving to the next town without paying anyone.
 
Kharzette

Kharzette

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Denamian said:
I'm talking about a standard smartphone, but replacing the launcher (think desktop and app drawer) with one geared towards simplicity. It's a trivial thing to do and there is no need to root the phone. Samsung phones even have an easy mode to simplify things.

Since you've mentioned accidental touches when handling the phone are a problem, you can disable tap to wake and lift to wake, so the screen doesn't come on until she hits the power button. Android is even built on the Linux kernel, so I figure that'd be right up your alley.
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I've got it set up to only come on via the side power button. I just can't get her to switch it off before grabbing all over it. I don't know how droid would help with that.

One mistake I made was showing her the drag-from-top screen (which someone told me is also an android thing). That's the screen that has the troublesome stuff.

And though it is dangerous, it has a better recent call list than the actual gnome calls phone app. There's a call back button, and it shows who called if they are in the contacts (a very rare thing).

Isn't android a bunch of java garbage? The thing that finally drove me to quit my job in Reno was how unbelievably horrible the android dev tools were. Like even worse than apple, which was 10 times worse than even the worst console I ever worked on.

I mean in theory I could just go get this GitHub - droidian/phosh: A pure Wayland shell prototype for GNOME on mobile devices. and change whatever I want. It's in C which I use as my daily. I can ssh into it and change whatever I want. I set up all her contacts that way in VI, it was nice.
 
Denamian

Denamian

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Kharzette said:
I've got it set up to only come on via the side power button. I just can't get her to switch it off before grabbing all over it. I don't know how droid would help with that.

One mistake I made was showing her the drag-from-top screen (which someone told me is also an android thing). That's the screen that has the troublesome stuff.

And though it is dangerous, it has a better recent call list than the actual gnome calls phone app. There's a call back button, and it shows who called if they are in the contacts (a very rare thing).

Isn't android a bunch of java garbage? The thing that finally drove me to quit my job in Reno was how unbelievably horrible the android dev tools were. Like even worse than apple, which was 10 times worse than even the worst console I ever worked on.

I mean in theory I could just go get this GitHub - droidian/phosh: A pure Wayland shell prototype for GNOME on mobile devices. and change whatever I want. It's in C which I use as my daily. I can ssh into it and change whatever I want. I set up all her contacts that way in VI, it was nice.
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Yeah, pulling down from the status bar is how you get to quick settings. Not much you can do if she stubbornly refuses to use the phone improperly.

Android has Java in it, but is written in C and C++. You can write apps in java, but kotlin is preferred now and they replaced the Java virtual machine with their own Android Runtime quite a few versions ago.

The only reason I was suggesting Android is because of its customization and the fact you seem to be having all sorts of issues with the Linux phone. Google's call screening is also pretty damn nice. I don't have to put my phone in DND in order to sleep during the day because of it.
 
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