A grandmother created by AI to answer fraudulent calls

New solution to protect yourself against fraudsters, on the phone: a grandmother who answers for you. Except that it doesn’t exist… it’s an artificial intelligence. Which would be very effective.

Canvassing, scams, telephone phishing… there are so many different types of unwanted calls. Each of them is annoying, in their own way. And you can receive them every day, or even several times a day.

Different parades exist. Don’t pick up: if it’s someone who really needs to contact you, with a real reason, they will leave you a voice message. Spam callers usually don’t do this. Or not yet (?). Or you can also block the numbers in question, but you have to do it one by one, and it only works after receiving this call. Then these people can change their number. These solutions work, but have limitations.

Daisy

O2, a British operator, has found yet another solution. It transfers these calls to a kind of automatic answering machine, made by an AI. So it’s Daisy, a friendly grandmother who loves to chat, who takes the call. A godsend, the scammers on the other end of the phone will say: elderly people are in fact the ideal targets for fraud. Except Daisy is going to tell them a ton of insignificant details about her life, and provide them with false and made-up banking information.

Enough to waste scammers’ time. A lot of time. According to O2, calls with Daisy last up to 40 minutes. Meanwhile, scammers are not going to call, and endanger, real people. Then seeing that it doesn’t lead to anything, they will say to themselves that there is no point in calling this person, and perhaps even blacklist “Daisy’s” number. The scammer… scammed. This is also one of the objectives of this AI: to take revenge on these malicious people. Because Daisy really pushes them to their limits and makes them lose their nerve (according to the presentation).

Here is a video of the grandmother in action. With his voice that sounds completely normal – and is even less obvious behind the crackle of a phone call.

O2 also invites its customers to transfer the numbers of people who are trying to scam them, to add them to the list of automatic referrals to Daisy and protect others.

Soon in Belgium?

The solution does not yet exist in Belgium or elsewhere in Europe. But if it is successful in the United Kingdom, we can imagine that another operator will want to implement it too. Especially since AI solutions are developing at incredible speed today, and in many languages.