Ready for the EU AI Act
When you call a business and an AI picks up, you have the right to know. That is the principle of Article 50 of the European regulation on artificial intelligence (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689). Tinos is designed from the outset to comply: our voice agent announces that it is an AI from the very first sentence.
What Article 50 says
The EU AI Act is the European regulation on artificial intelligence. Its Article 50 sets out a transparency obligation: when a person interacts with an AI system, they must be informed of it, unless this is obvious from the context. For a voice agent that answers the phone in place of a human, this means one simple, clear thing.
“Providers shall ensure that AI systems intended to interact directly with natural persons are designed and developed in such a way that the natural persons concerned are informed that they are interacting with an AI system, unless this is obvious from the point of view of a natural person who is reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect […].”
- Announced from the first sentence. Before even stating their request, the caller knows they are dealing with an automated assistant.
- No deceptive impersonation. The agent never pretends to be a human member of the team, nor does it hide its nature.
- Information, not a barrier. Transparency is built into the greeting script without lengthening or weighing down the conversation.
Clear information, from the first interaction
Article 50 does not merely state that information must be given: it specifies how. The information must be provided “in a clear and distinguishable manner, at the latest at the time of the first interaction” and remain compliant with accessibility requirements. For a voice agent, this translates simply: the announcement comes from the very first sentence, in plain language, without jargon.
A phased timeline of application
The regulation entered into force on 1 August 2024 and applies in stages: prohibited practices since 2 February 2025, the rules on general-purpose AI models since 2 August 2025, and the bulk of the obligations — including Article 50 on transparency — on 2 August 2026. Certain obligations specific to high-risk systems only take effect in 2027. The date that concerns Tinos is therefore 2 August 2026, and our AI announcement is already active today.
Neither prohibited nor “high-risk” — a transparency system
The regulation classifies AI systems by level of risk. A voice agent that answers, qualifies and books appointments falls neither among the prohibited practices (Article 5) nor among the high-risk systems (Annex III): it comes under the transparency obligations of Article 50. We comply with them, and we do not claim a category that would not be ours.
The AI Act complements the GDPR, it does not replace it
As the CNIL points out, the AI regulation does not replace the GDPR: it adds to it. The protection of your data remains governed by the GDPR (lawfulness, security, data subjects’ rights), while the AI Act adds risk-based obligations, such as transparency. The two apply together — see our GDPR & data protection page.
Designed from the outset to comply with it
The AI announcement is not an option that can be disabled: it is part of how the agent works. We are talking here about a product designed to comply and ready for the text coming into application, not about an official certification: to date, no “EU AI Act compliant” label is self-awarded. Our commitment is concrete and verifiable from the moment you hear the first call.