UNUSUAL – « Daisy » will become the worst nightmare of telephone scammers. This fake grandmother, generated by artificial intelligence, was invented to make them lose “hundreds of hours”. With her very realistic quavering voice and her inexhaustible reservoir of questions, she is enough to drive scammers crazy. Because as she has difficulty understanding the explanations, this granny repeats everything. Worse, she's looking for a little company and has all her time on her hands.
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It is an invention of the British telephone operator O2, which recalls that no less than 7 out of 10 people have already been targeted by telephone scams in the United Kingdom. Fake salespeople who want to sell shutters, fictitious bankers who ask for bank details, or even delivery people who have difficulty finding the address where to drop off their package. They all have the same goal: to extract money or personal information. For less than benevolent purposes of course.
How does this “work” fake grandmother »
But now they will come up against the formidable Daisy. The operator O2 invites the British to send all scammers' numbers to 7726 so that they are redirected to this Artificial Intelligence, which adapts to each interlocutor.
But how can this granny seem credible for all the scams? “ Daisy combines multiple AI models that work together to listen to the caller and transcribe their voice into text. Appropriate responses are then generated using a large language model,” explains the British operator. These responses are then “ fed back to a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate a voice response”all “ in real time.”
Objective: keep the scammer online as long as possible. “I have all the time in the world, and while they are busy talking to me, they don’t have time to bother you,” rejoices the grandmother in a video published by the operator which you can see above.
In France it is also possible to report scams: simply call or send an SMS to 33 700, which is free, or go to the site www.33700.fr. It is possible to simply forward the scam message to 33 700, but “the more precise reports there are, the more effective the actions to counter these harmful practices are”explains the government.
Be careful though, this system is only reserved for scammers, those who ask for your personal data or try to extract money from you, and not for cold calling. However, it is possible to limit this type of calls by registering for free at www.bloctel.gouv.fr.
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