Granted, this appears to be available in England only for now, and it’s intended to fight fraud and scams, but it’s likely only a matter of time before it makes its way westward to the United States and could possibly be deployed against collection calls. England’s largest cellphone carrier has unveiled a new technology that could pose a new challenge for debt collectors. Its secret weapon? A bored grandmother with nothing but time on her hands, generated by artificial intelligence.
Driving the news: O2, the United Kingdom’s largest mobile network operator, has introduced “dAIsy,” an AI-powered chatbot designed to engage callers in prolonged conversations.
- Meet dAIsy: An AI granny who autonomously chats with callers, sharing stories about her knitting, her cat Fluffy, and other meandering topics.
- Real-time interaction: dAIsy uses advanced AI to listen, process, and respond to callers without human intervention.
- Technical prowess: She employs a combination of AI models that transcribe the caller’s voice into text, generate contextually appropriate responses via a custom language model infused with a “personality” layer, and convert the text back into a human-like voice.
- The AI was trained in part by Jim Browning, a “scambait” expert with a huge YouTube following.
By the numbers: More than 70% of Brits would like to get back at scammers that have tried to trick them or their loved ones, according to O2. But the top reason why they don’t is because they don’t want to waste their own time doing it.
- Daisy has already been used to keep some scammers on the phone for as long as 40 minutes, according to O2.
