Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time
An AI voice bot named “Daisy,” modeled as a kindly elderly woman, is being used by a telecom provider to engage suspected phone scammers and waste their time so they have fewer opportunities to target real victims. Commenters see it as a clever evolution of earlier anti‑spam bots and a potential way to raise the economic cost of scamming, but also question whether it’s mainly a PR stunt, note that telecoms could instead block bad traffic at the network level, and worry about false positives and perverse incentives. Many anticipate an arms race where AI scam callers and AI “grannies” talk mostly to each other, highlighting broader concerns about spam, attention economics, and the future usefulness of phone calls.
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.