I must admit, I also need a grandmother like this. Recently, at least once a day, my phone - kosher of course - rings. On the line, representatives of the righteous and holy funds inform me about a historic prayer at a rare tomb at a special hour and ask for my name for prayer. Usually, I respond politely and explain "thanks but no thanks." But sometimes I find myself talking to myself, as the voice on the other end of the receiver is a voice bot that just says hello and after a few seconds automatically announces the good news that for 100 shekels per month, I can join the premium prayer package with a bonus salvation and magic amulet from Baba Something.
I must admit that in the past, I used to receive many more harassment calls and rings from distributors, scammers, fraudsters, and dubious offer makers about winning lotteries or offers for mortgages and insurance at loss-making prices. Maybe it's because I'm on the do-not-call list, though even after being on the list, it's not completely hermetic.
But while for me it's just harassment and nothing more, for elderly people it's a dangerous reality where scammers sell them products they don't need or steal their money. Personally, I encountered an elderly person who paid an enormous sum of half a million shekels because of a stupid email they received.
This is where Grandma Daisy enters the story. Daisy is a new voice bot developed by British telecommunications company O2, together with Jim Browning, a YouTuber expert in scams. She's an imaginary grandmother whose sole purpose is to drive scammers crazy. While she harasses and annoys them, they can't scam other elderly people.
It's a sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) system designed to do one thing: waste scammers' time. The system was specially designed with the voice and character of a friendly and slightly confused grandmother. She conducts exhausting phone conversations with scammers and tells endless stories about: imaginary cats, fictional knitting projects, grandchildren who are about to visit, complicated recipes, medical check-ups, and other grandmother tales and old wives' tales.
What the entrepreneurs did was add her number to all distribution lists and various customer databases, ensuring her number would appear in existing spam lists online. The scammer who calls gets an immediate response from a friendly grandmother and starts having a conversation with her. She asks about his life, tells him about the complicated cake she made, and explains in detail how to make the cake. He, of course, listens patiently, tries to be nice and polite, thinking that in the end, he'll manage to get money from her.
She maintains a pleasant but confused conversation, asks for repeated explanations, and shows "lack of understanding" in technical matters, which keeps the scammers busy for a long time. The company claims she manages to keep scammers on the line for an average of nearly 40 minutes!
In several recordings published by the company, you can hear the scammer after nearly an hour of conversation where he was nice and charming, asking her for credit card details. But each time she talks to him about the grandchildren who are supposed to visit and explains that she currently doesn't remember her credit card details. He pressures her for details and she responds: "My dear, did I tell you about my grandchildren?"
That's when he gets angry and starts cursing at her and aggressively says: "Don't call me 'my dear,'" and she repeatedly responds politely: "My dear, I so enjoy talking to you, how time flies when you're having fun. I have all the time in the world to talk to you!"
Now all we need is to create a phone bot that will invent names for prayer or automatically give all the ingredients and even try to get the telemarketers to sign up for standing orders and blessings of the righteous, and thus everyone will benefit, and redemption will come to Zion!
