A Great Use for AI: Wasting Scammers Time!

We may have found the killer app for AI. Well, actually, British telecom provider O2 has. As The Guardian reports, they have an AI chatbot that acts like a 78-year-old grandmother and receives phone calls. Of course, since the grandmother—Daisy, by name—doesn’t get any real phone calls, anyone calling that number is probably a scammer. Daisy’s specialty? Keeping them tied up on the phone.

While this might just seem like a prank for revenge, it is actually more than that. Scamming people is a numbers game. Most people won’t bite. So, to be successful, scammers have to make lots of calls. Daisy can keep one tied up for around 40 minutes or more.

You can see some of Daisy’s antics in the video below. Or listen to Daisy do her thing in the second video. When a bogus tech support agent tried to direct Daisy to the Play Store, she replied, “Did you say pastry?” Some of them became quite flustered. She even has her own homepage.

While we have mixed feelings about some AI applications, this is one we think everyone can get onboard with. Well, everyone but the scammers.

It might not do voice, but you can play with local AI models easily now. Spoofing scammers is the perfect job for the worst summer intern ever.