The forward march of progress, AI to trick your telemarketer

Hanging up on annoying telemarketers is the easiest way to deal with them, but that just sends their autodialers onto the next unfortunate victim. Roger Anderson decided that telemarketers deserved a crueler fate, so he programmed an artificially intelligent bot that keeps them on the line for as long as possible.

Anderson, who works in the telecom industry and has a better understanding of how telemarketing call-in techniques work than most, first created a call-answering robot that tricked autodialers into thinking there was an actual person answering the phone. So instead of the machine automatically hanging up after ten seconds, a simple pre-recorded “hello?, hello?” message would have the call sent to a telemarketer who would waste a few precious moments until they realized there really wasn’t anyone there.

But Anderson then wondered just how long his robot could keep a telemarketer on the line for. It turns out, for surprisingly long.

…Here’s the best part: anyone can connect telemarketers calling and harassing them to Anderson’s auto-responding robot using the simple instructions he’s posted to his site

There is more here, via HarpersNotes.

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