Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft
1 year ago
What should be done is something else entirely. Apple and Google should offer, as part of their standard software, a personal "phone robot". When you get a new phone, you spend 15 minutes recording various phrases, and from that point on you just have the robot answer for you.
When the robot talks to these spammers and telemarketers, it will try to keep them on the phone as long as possible. A minute would be good, 10 minutes would be better. As the spammers tried to avoid this, Apple and Google could improve the robots to counter.
And, within a few months of this, at most, that industry would just be dead. It can't afford to spend a half hour on each call trying to determine if they've got a real live knucklehead who will start sending cash to Nigerian princes, or just bad software tricking operators who don't speak English as a first language. Their margins would drop, their need for more sophisticated AI to try to determine if they were talking to a real person or not would skyrocket, etc. It just wouldn't be economically viable to continue.
Not sure why this would come from Google or Apple. You basically just described RoboKiller, which already exists.
So that it would be standard, and could tap into the "setting up my new phone".
Just looked up Robokiller...
>Robokiller is a phone app that blocks 99% of spam calls and texts with predictive analytics and audio fingerprinting.
Doesn't look like what I'm talking about at all. We don't want the calls to be blocked, we want them to linger on forever. I'm not sure why that's so difficult to understand.
RoboKiller has "answer bots" that do what you said. They just keep saying things like "hello? I'm sorry, I don't understand" etc.
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I think they just basically described Kitboga[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitboga_(streamer)
Not unless you think I was saying that we should clone the man, and chain him to every cell phone in America.
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Computer time isn't that expensive; I'm relatively certain that the calls I get are either fully driven by voice recognition, or by someone in the third world or in prison, pressing buttons that activate pre-recorded statements by a script.
The former is cheap enough that yes, they would engage for 15 minutes. The latter are smart enough to understand what's going on so that they'd hang up.
> The former is cheap enough that yes, they would engage for 15 minutes.
No, they wouldn't. This isn't "hey, when they call some random number and talk to a grandma that will never buy their stuff/scams, is wasting 15 minutes that once a big deal for them".
It's 15 minutes on every call, or enough that they can't filter down to those who will end up sending money.
> The latter are smart enough to understand what's going on so that they'd hang up.
That's debatable. But even if they are smart enough, please describe what logic you think they're using that they can tell pre-recorded voice responses from a live person? What exactly would go on in one of those calls? Did his "oh sure, uh huh" sound a little too much like the last one?
They're not supergeniuses.
just forward the call to lenny. https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/