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A UK cell phone network has introduced an AI granny who can answer calls in real-time from scammers and waste their time.
The phone company, Virgin Media O2, states, “It’s a bad day to be a phone scammer” as it unveils Daisy. This human-like grandmother has been created using technology and “real scam baiter content.”
The AI granny is said to be “indistinguishable from a real person, following scammers into thinking they’ve found a perfect target when really, she’s beating them at their own horrible game.”
The new addition to the company’s fraud prevention team has been given the role of ‘Head of Scammer Relations’ and she’s already been taking calls for the last several weeks.
The mobile phone operator says the “AI Scambaiter has told frustrated scammers meandering stories of her family, talked at length about her passion for knitting and provided exasperated callers with false personal information including made-up bank details.
“By tricking the criminals into thinking they were defrauding a real person and playing on scammers biases about older people, Daisy has prevented them from targeting real victims and, most importantly, has exposed the common tactics used so customers can better protect themselves.”
How has the AI granny been created to combat phone scammers?
Human-like AI has been created by combining various AI models that work together to first listen to the caller and transcribe their voice into text.
Appropriate responses are then generated through a custom large language model that comes complete with a character ‘personality’ layer and fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to create a voice answer. This all takes place in real-time, with the tool able to hold a human-like conversation with a caller.
Daisy has been created as part of Virgin Media O2’s ongoing ‘Swerve the Scammers’ campaign. The Director of Fraud at the company, Murray Mackenzie, says: “We’re committed to playing our part in stopping the scammers, investing in everything from firewall technology to block out scam texts to AI-powered spam call detection to keep our customers safe.
“The newest member of our fraud-prevention team, Daisy, is turning the tables on scammers – outsmarting and outmaneuvering them at their own cruel game simply by keeping them on the line.”
Featured Image: AI-generated via Ideogram
