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Artificial intelligence is a much-maligned technology with many asking if we really need it at all but a British telecommunications company may have found a useful application for it.
O2 has come up with an AI grandma called “Daisy” which is designed to waste scammers’ time by keeping them on the phone for as long as possible — keeping the crooks away from real people.
Daisy is trained on “cutting-edge technology” and O2 says Daisy is indistinguishable from a real person. Scammers, believing they have found the perfect target, are unable to tell they are speaking with an AI.
02 added Daisy’s phone numbers to the list used by scammers to target vulnerable people. When the scammers call Daisy, the bot is able to maintain random conversations about made-up family members or fake hobbies. Daisy will even provide false bank details to keep the scammers occupied.
Scam calls are a significant problem in the U.S. and in the U.K. Million of Americans receive scam calls every day with older adults targeted disproportionately by the criminals.
O2 put out a video about Daisy where the bot reveals that “seven in ten Brits” have been targeted by scammers. The video features clips of Daisy talking to scammers who are audibly frustrated.
“I think your profession is bothering people, right?” says one scam artist with an Indian accent. “I’m just trying to have a little chat,” replies Daisy.
“It’s nearly been an hour,” exclaims another scammer. “Gosh, how time flies,” Daisy says calmly.
O2 says it enlisted the help of one of YouTube’s best-known scam baiters Jim Browning to build Daisy which can interact with scammers in real-time without any input from her creators.
“Daisy combines various AI models which work together to listen and respond to fraudulent calls instantaneously and is so lifelike it has successfully kept numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a time,” says O2.
The telecom operator came up with the idea for Daisy after a survey revealed that 71% of Britons want to get revenge on scammers but don’t want to waste their own time.