Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

Overall reaction

• Many commenters like the idea and call it one of the more satisfying uses of AI.
• Others see it mainly as a PR stunt that dodges deeper structural fixes to spam and telecom incentives.

Precedents and similar tools

• Multiple references to earlier non‑AI “time‑waster” bots (e.g., Lenny, Telecrapper 2000, Jolly Roger) that already kept scammers talking for many minutes.
• Some note that carefully designed pre‑recorded scripts can be very effective without modern AI.

Technical approach and cost

• Surprise that Daisy uses a speech‑to‑text + LLM + text‑to‑speech pipeline instead of end‑to‑end speech, but people note this is cheaper even if latency is higher.
• A few worry real‑time AI conversations are too expensive and bandwidth‑heavy to scale to large volumes of scam calls.
• Others argue any defense only needs to raise attacker costs; doubling call “dwell time” could significantly cut scam profitability.

How O2 is using it

• Clarification that Daisy numbers are honeypots: specific numbers always route to the bot, not general interception of customer calls.
• Some propose cycling Daisy numbers: let scammers blacklist them, then reassign those “spam‑free” numbers to customers and generate new honeypots.

Telco incentives and regulation

• Strong skepticism that big telcos truly want to stop spam, since they earn per‑call revenue and face common‑carrier constraints and liability risks.
• Reports of carriers silently routing suspected spam to generic voicemail, raising concerns about false positives and user consent.
• Suggestions that spam calls are already illegal and the real failure is enforcement and traceability, especially with IP telephony.

Alternative defenses and redesign ideas

• Popular user‑level tactics: IVR “press 1 to continue,” call screening (notably on some smartphones), sending unknown callers to voicemail, and ignoring unknown numbers.
• Proposals to make attention costly: pay‑to‑call or pay‑to‑email schemes, hashcash‑style proof‑of‑work, or per‑message micro‑fees to crush bulk spam.
• Ideas to move away from simple numeric phone numbers toward verified or much larger address spaces to make mass‑dialing harder.

Ethics, geopolitics, and social impact

• Some highlight that many call‑center workers operate under coercion or in corrupt environments; others respond that there are ample honest alternatives and scamming the vulnerable is indefensible.
• Discussion of weak rule of law and corruption in countries hosting major scam operations, and frustration that ordinary citizens there also hate scammers.
• Broad sentiment that spam and scams are degrading phone calls as a viable communication channel; many now default to never answering unknown numbers.