I find that a majority of our incoming calls are scams. Surprised that Google/Apple haven’t fixed this at the behest of the government.
Calls from my area code of residence are almost never spam, while calls from any other area code, and especially my phone's area code, are almost always spam.
It can identify scammers' numbers (based on user reports). And the phone app will label the call as suspected spam.
There is also a setting to outright block incoming calls from numbers labeled as spammers.
Then there is call screening. The google bot will answer the call and ask questions that you select (like "who are you and why are you calling?"). You get a real time voice transcription of the answer so that you can decide to pick up if needed. But it's handy for spammers because they usually just hang up (or you get some half-transcripted text of a robocall message that was talking over the Google bot).
It doesn't solve the problem completely but it does help.
But it is great, when someone calls and i don't have them in my address book they show me the name of them, for example the name of the doctor offices, companies etc. As you can see in the demo carousel on their page, it shows "SMART" next to it, which emphazises that this isn't a number in your contacts but fetched from the internet.
Or if they are likely spam, my whole display is red and i can immediately hang up.
I wonder if this is a rollout thing -- I had AT&T for years, and towards the end (about a year ago) I began receiving spam notices. But I was in one of their "primary" markets, so it's possible they rolled it out first here.