Is AI calling legal in India?

⚠️ This is not legal advice, and we are not qualified to give it. What follows is how we have built the product and what we think the sensible questions are. If you are making decisions with real exposure, ask a lawyer who knows telecom regulation — not a vendor, and not this page.

The question is usually three questions

“Is AI calling legal” almost always bundles together three quite different things, which have quite different answers.

Can something automated answer a call to my own business number? This is the least contentious of the three. A customer rings you and something answers. Very little of the concern in this area is about inbound.

Can I call people who have not asked me to? This is the contentious one, and it is not really an AI question at all — it is the unsolicited-commercial-calling question, which long predates any of this. The AI does not change whether you had the right to make the call.

Can I message people on WhatsApp? Largely governed by Meta’s own rules on top of anything else: templates, the 24-hour window, and quality ratings that throttle you if recipients complain.

The part vendors get wrong

You will see “TRAI compliant” on product pages across this market. Treat that claim with suspicion, including if we ever made it — honouring an opt-out is not the same as being compliant with any particular regime, and a compliance promise is the one over-claim with genuine legal teeth.

Nobody’s software makes you compliant. What software can do is make the right behaviour the default and the wrong behaviour hard.

What we actually do

Stated as mechanisms rather than assurances, so you can judge them:

Opt-out is honoured permanently and everywhere. A customer who replies stop — or unsubscribe, take me off your list, and the Malayalam, Manglish, Hindi and Hinglish equivalents — stops promotional follow-ups on every channel, including calls. They get an immediate reply confirming what changed.

An opt-out spoken on a call counts. The transcript is read at the end of the call, so somebody who says it out loud is not ignored because they did not text it.

Nobody can undo it — including us. Once a customer opts out, no one at your business and no one at Kooday can put them back on. Only they can, by replying start. That is unusually strict for this market and it is deliberate.

A do-not-call list is enforced at dial time, at the point a call target is claimed, rather than as a filter earlier in the process that something could bypass.

Order and payment updates keep flowing unless someone says stop all, so a customer who opts out of marketing still hears about the thing they bought.

⚠️ What we do not do: we do not verify that you had consent in the first place. When you upload a contact list, that is your attestation, not something we check. The opt-out side is enforced by the platform; the opt-in side is yours.

The questions worth asking any vendor

1. What happens when someone says stop on a phone call, not in a text?
2. Can anyone at my business put an opted-out customer back on the list?
3. Is do-not-call enforced when the call is placed, or when the list is built?
4. Do you claim compliance with a named regime — and if so, on what basis?

That last one is a good test. A vendor who answers it carefully is more likely to have thought about the problem than one who says yes.