► In brief
- Virgin Media O2 launched Daisy
- This is an AI-powered virtual grandmother
- Its role is to keep the crooks busy
There are more and more spams, scams and other telephone mischief. So much so that, despite laws and regulations, we no longer know how to block them. So, to protect ourselves against these repeated scams, which cause many victims, everyone is doing their own thing. New example in the United Kingdom, where an operator has just launched Daisy, a virtual grandmother responsible for making scam professionals go crazy.
A virtual grandmother against scammers
Behind Daisy is in reality an Artificial Intelligence, launched by the Virgin Media operator O2 on November 15. Its role is simple: to attract telephone scammers to waste their time, and thus protect the telephone numbers of real people. To do this, the operator not only registered a fake number, redirecting to Daisy, in public lists, but also retrieved reports to add scammer numbers to the automatic redirections to the virtual granny.
AI to better protect you?
If the idea may make you smile, Virgin nevertheless indicates that Daisy managed to keep crooks captive to her rantings for a little less than an hour. What is there to say that it works? It’s possible: after all, AI is increasingly used to combat telephone scams. Predictive algorithms, automatic voice filters and other advanced techniques are deployed by operators as well as smartphone manufacturers to reduce risks.
But we have bad news: for the moment, Daisy only exists across the Channel. It is therefore impossible to count on this extreme grandmother to protect our French numbers.
