To combat phone scams, British operators create an AI generated “grandmother”. This is to make the scammers waste their time.

The “worst” nightmare of scammers is when they try to steal money over the telephone, pretending to be your bank or technical support. What about delivery people, couriers, etc.? A grandmother that talks a lot!

The British phone operator O2 came up with this idea. On Thursday, November 14, the company unveiled “Daisy”, a program that mimics a talkative grandmother to keep scammers at the other end of the line for as long as they can.

The operator shows a few examples in a video, where the monotone, slow-voiced program makes its opponents look foolish. Daisy makes the interlocutors repeat their instructions, pretends to not understand them, and explains she just wants a “bit of conversation.

The program explains that “while you’re talking with me, they won’t be able to rip off your money”. In its press release , the operator states that Daisy had already kept many scammers “on the phone for forty minutes”.

The watered sprinklers

How do scammers get identified, and then redirected towards Daisy? O2, when contacted by Franceinfo, said it had worked with professionals that trap scammers. O2 explains it used “several techniques including number seeding“: intentionally letting Daisy’s phone number appear in lists of scammers’ numbers (“mug lists”) so they call Daisy… and get caught themselves.

What is AI? Daisy, according to the operator, “combines several AI model that listens to callers and then transcribes their voice to text. The operator claims that “Daisy” “combines several AI models to listen to the caller and transcribe their voice into text”.

O2 says that the written answers are sent back to an AI text-to speech model customized to produce a voice in real-time . O2 explains that AI does not solve all problems. To reduce the chances of being scammed, it encourages users to report suspicious messages and calls to local numbers and call their relatives directly when an unknown number pretends to be someone they know.

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