On Thursday, O2, Britain’s largest mobile network operator, launched a chatbot designed to thwart phone scammers. The app, called “dAIsy,” imitates an older woman with all kinds of time for knitting and her cat, Fluffy, to keep scammers constantly engaged as they try to figure out her (fake) banking details.
According to O2’s press release about “AI Granny,” it is a “various AI model” that converts a caller’s voice into text, generates a response through a custom large language model, and then feeds it through a text-to-speech model to generate speech. Combine . answer. The AI was partially trained by Jim Browning, a “scam” expert with a huge YouTube following.
It’s actually fun to watch. (O2 says the audio in the video below is real.) The more it scratches, the better. Last year, the FBI reported that people over 60 were scammed out of $3.4 billion through phone scams. This is an increase from $3.1 billion in 2022. With the advent of generative AI and voice mimicry, that number will increase further.
