The UK’s largest mobile operator O2 has introduced a chatbot designed to stop telephone scammers from defrauding older people.
British operator O2 introduced an “AI granny” to communicate with telephone scammers
Author: Ekaterina Alipova
The bot, called dAIsy, imitates an elderly woman who has time to chat—about knitting, about her cat Fluffy—with the goal of endlessly distracting scammers while they try to get her bank details. They are from the “AI-grandmother”, as users immediately nicknamed her, they are fake, the developers specify in press release.
O2’s “AI Granny” combines “various artificial intelligence models.” Some convert the caller’s voice into text, others then generate a response using a large language model, and others convert it into speech. It is known that Jim Browning, an expert in “baits” for scammers with a huge number of subscribers on YouTube, participated in the development and training of the bot.
Last year, the FBI reported that $3.4 billion was stolen from people over 60 through phone scams, up from $3.1 billion in 2022. With the development of generative AI and voice simulations, the numbers will grow even more.
In Russia, such a bot would also be useful. According to Sberbank, every day in the country is being done up to 15 million fraudulent calls, if you count instant messengers (attackers are actively hacking them). And according to estimates by the legal service “Unified Center for Protection”, the number of victims has increased by 72% since 2015. By September 2024, the damage from fraudulent activities reached almost 250 billion rubles.
Cover photo: Unsplash
Source: rb.ru
