O2's Conversational AI Granny wastes the time of scammers
I did have to smile when I saw the latest release from Virgin Media O2 detailing their aim to try and fight scammers.
The company has deployed a bot trained by the super-famous YouTube scambaiter Jim Browning (do have a watch of some of his videos!)
The company is encouraging customers (and, I suppose, non-customers too!) to report any scam messages to them at their shortcode number 7726.
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
I couldn't find any mention of the vendor behind the service but here's a bit more detail from the release:
Daisy combines various AI models which 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 complete with a character ‘personality’ layer, and then fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate a voice answer. This takes place in real time, allowing the tool to hold a human-like conversation with a caller.
Nice work Team O2!
And here's the video they released giving an overview - you can also meet the AI Granny too:
