[DemonRaven]

Story link- How to stop cold callers

We all hate getting disturbed by cold callers trying to sell us things we don't want. Which is why one man has made it his mission to fight back by building an artificial-intelligence robot that can talk to the caller for you and keep them hanging on the line for as long as possible.

The Jolly Roger telephone is a chatbot that can string along pesky callers pedalling phone insurance or business loans by using a recorded human voice saying things such as 'Yes', 'Uh huh' and 'Right' at perfectly timed moments in the conversation. To make sure the cold caller continues, the clever piece of software pranks the person on the other end using tactics such as pretending to talk to his 'wife' or asking the caller to repeat what they just said, saying that he's just woken up. Thanks to a silence-detection algorithm, it's even savvy enough to know when the caller is starting to suspect they might be talking to a robot and can suddenly blurt out an off-the-wall comment, which ultimately gets them hanging on a little longer.

ADVERTISING

Website link
Jolly Roger Telephone

I think this is a ingenious use of a chatbot. Granted it is not new technology but it is a fun one. I know that some telemarketers also use chatbots and it would be totally hilarious if it ended up with just chatbots talking to each other while the human goes about his business.

[squarebear]

This is great stuff. I happened across this last night and his Youtube videos are well worth watching. Some of the bot's responses fit in so well with the phone call.

This one is very funny. The other videos on his channel are also well worth watching:

[dawning]

Yeah, great, but I think this is still kind of wasting my time. I prefer to just ignore if the number shows up on my caller ID is unfamiliar. I sometimes just look up the number on Google or some sites like http://whycall.me just to see if there have been some reports filed under that number, so that I can easily block them without even talking to those telemarketers.

[Freddy]

I thought that was really funny 

I wanted to do something similar with TTS years back, but the voice would probably not convince anyone as well as this.

Great find.

[Don Patrick]

I could use one of these but I would just want it to say "no" for me (I was raised too polite). Dawning has a point, as while the phone's busy, other people can't call me. Funny though. Artificial Irony.