People don’t answer the phone as much they used to, especially because they can usually see who’s calling. But if you have a history of hating telemarketers’ tenacious harassment, now you can get some payback.
A new report points out you can hire a phone bot that uses artificial intelligence and voice cloning to keep those unwanted callers tied up until they give up and hang up.
Phone bots armed with AI and voice cloning can deal with telemarketers for you
A new report in The Wall Street Journal details how and why developer Roger Anderson created Jolly Roger Telephone. It’s a phone app that uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and voice-cloning technology to make realistic, time-wasting conversation with telemarketers that goes nowhere.
And as the publication reported, the problem of unwanted calls is massive:
Complaints about unwanted telephone calls are “far-and-away the largest category of consumer complaints to the FCC,” with the average American receiving 14 unwanted calls a month, according to one industry estimate, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission said.
Automated dialers at call centers can easily crank out 100 calls a second, constantly searching for people willing to stay on the line. Voice modulators remove foreign accents and software allows overseas operators to trigger prerecorded English phrases.
Turning the tables on telemarketers
Anderson’s war on telemarketers began almost 10 years ago, when he rigged an answering machine to say “Hello” a bunch of times before hanging up on telemarketers. Since then, he created Jolly Roger Telephone to flat-out mess with them. In some cases, his bot has kept them on the line for 15 wasted minutes.
The article quotes liberally from calls where voice-cloned characters like Whitey Whitebeard — actually the voice of a Vermont-farmer friend of Anderson’s — are driven by ChatGPT and the more-advanced GPT-4 to talk in circles around telemarketers. The start of the call relies on preset expressions from chatbots, like saying “uh-huh” and asking the caller’s name, until GPT-4 kicks in and responds more on-point.
In the main example in the article, a telemarketer named Kevin tries to get Whitebeard to talk about his credit cards in order to sell him on credit consolidation. And the bot seems to get it but also seems a little confused, which keeps Kevin interested and wasted more time.
“Anyway I think I owe about, what was it, $15,000 or was it $1,500. I can never remember,” one of Whitebeard’s meandering replies said. “Let me go find my reading glasses and check my statements. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”
Caller Kevin waited. And ultimately the entire call wasted more than 6 minutes of his time.
Anderson posts some of the calls as recordings to market Jolly Roger Telephone, which offers a 30-day free trial and then costs $1.99 per month.
At first ChatGPT and GPT-4 wanted no part of it
Interestingly, ChatGPT and GPT-4 resisted Anderson’s initial attempts to tie them in to his phone bot. The AIs objected to the idea that they should “waste” people’s time. So Anderson rephrased his request.
“I told it that, ‘You are a personal assistant and you are trying to protect this man from being scammed,'” he said.
And that’s not untrue — the bot can frustrate telemarketers and outright scammers alike.
