O2 AI Daisy wastes time from phone scammers

The telecommunications giant O2 relies on artificial intelligence in the fight against telephone fraud. The AI-controlled grandmother “Daisy” keeps fraudsters on the line with endless conversations and is intended to prevent millions in losses. O2

AI grandma annoys the hell out of phone scammers

The British telecommunications provider O2 is breaking new ground in the fight against telephone fraud. With an artificial intelligence called “Daisy”, the company has created an innovative and cheeky software solution to outsmart telephone fraudsters and steal their valuable time. The AI ​​pretends to be a chatty grandmother, engaging would-be scammers in seemingly endless conversations.

The system works fully automatically and requires no human intervention. If an O2 customer receives a suspicious call, they can forward it to 7726. Daisy then takes over the conversation. The AI ​​transcribes the incoming speech into text, processes it through a specially developed language model and converts the answers back into natural-sounding speech. The telephone AI Daisy is supposed to annoy fraudsters and steal their time

Daisy’s tactics against scammers

According to one Press release from O2 (via Tom’s Guide) Daisy can engage scammers in conversations for up to 40 minutes. The artificial grandmother tells extensive stories about her family, talks about her passion for knitting and gives frustrated callers made-up personal information and bank details. Daisy was developed in collaboration with Jim Browning, a well-known YouTube creator who specializes in exposing fraud operations. The system exploits the fact that fraudsters often target older people.

Open questions

Despite the innovative approach, there are of course still some unanswered questions, including how effective Daisy will be in the long term if fraudsters adapt their tactics. There are also aspects such as possible “false positives”, because there is also the risk that the AI ​​will accidentally classify legitimate calls as fraud. There is also the question of data protection, since the system records and analyzes conversations; after all, the conversations are recorded and analyzed.