Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

If you use a VoIP service like Twilio and voip.ms, you can set up a very simple IVR menu that just asks unknown callers to press 1 to be connected to you. No AI involved.

For me, this has been surprisingly effective against robocalls. Obviously this isn’t going to work against scammers who call directly, but most of the spam calls I receive start with some pre-recorded message which isn’t going to pass the menu.

Edit: s/auto/pre

If they ever get clever enough to automate the menu selection, it would be funny to have an infinitely deep IVR sort of like the tar pits people build on websites to trap web crawlers.

I think I've gotten exactly one spam call since I set up an IVR like that a few years ago, and it was probably not quite daily before that.

My Pixel 8 (not sure what other Android phones do this) can screen calls using their AI assistant. It asks what the call is about. If they answer, it displays the text to you as it rings through.

It sounds surprisingly human-like, even saying "Hello?" in a slightly annoyed tone when the other person doesn't respond in time.

Its kind of funny to think we've already had many of these services that were apparently really ahead of their time.

I remember being an outside sales rep for a local mom and pop wireless company in the late 90's, early aughts. We sold an automated "assistant" called Wildfire that would screen calls and stood as an intermediary between you can callers. She would answer, you would record your name and then it would call you on any number of devices you had entered. At one point, I had it calling three of my numbers (office and two mobile numbers) and at any time, you could just send people to voicemail. It was very similar to how many of the AI assistants work today. If I remember it was like $30/month, but as reps we got to use it for free which was really fun tinkering with it.

AT&T also had something like this where you could have a program they offered which would screen your calls and either connect you or you could send people directly to voicemail. It didn't have nearly the features that Wildfire had, but it was effective.

Obviously in the late 90's and early aughts, something like this wasn't really needed and after a few quarters, AT&T quietly stopped offering their service. Wildfire lived on until the mid aughts after being bought and then killed due to lack of adoption and use.

Kind of crazy these kinds of programs were pretty common before the AI assistant craze now.

Details about Wildfire here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_Communications

It's a great idea, and in Canada using the Koodo/Telus network you can turn on "call control" for free which does basically this, except it makes the caller enter a random number between 1-9. And you can also whitelist certain numbers like friends and family.

that is a surprisingly awesome phone feature

I seem to vaguely recall this Wildfire brand name....Because when i first got google voice, it was really half of an acquired company...which if remember correctly was a competitor to wildfire, no? Like grandcentral or something? Anyway, yeah, when i first got google voicemail, this feature was really impressive! But, of course eventually learned that this tyoe of thing already existed in some corners :-)

I have pixel 7, and I think this feature is or very unstable, or cell-provider dependent. It was on my phone, then was not, then re-appeared briefly again, now it is not even in settings.

Have your Bot call my Bot and they’ll have lunch.

Those Pixel features are underrated.

Another good one is for the phone to stay on hold for you. That one has been extremely valuable to me as Qantas would regularly keep me on hold for over 5 hours when I tried to get my money back for a cancelled flight. The operator would sometimes be a bit confused when I pick up, but it usually worked well and certainly beats listening to hold music for hours.

… until Qantas deploys AI bots that can keep your AI going indefinitely!

I wish it was available on my pixel, but only in US I guess.