‘AI Granny’ is happy to talk to phone scammers all day

On Thursday, the UK’s largest mobile network operator, O2, launched a chatbot designed to frustrate scammers. Called “dAIsy,” it stars an elderly woman who has all kinds of chatter — about knitting, her cat Fluffy — in order to keep scammers endlessly busy as they try to get her (fake) bank details.

A press release about O2’s “AI Granny” says it combines “various AI models” that transcribe a caller’s voice into text before generating a response with a custom giant language model, then feeding it through a text-to-speech model for voice output. the answer. The AI ​​was trained in part by Jim Browning, a “scambait” expert with a huge YouTube following.

It’s fun to see it in action. (O2 says the sound in the video below is real.) If it makes a splash, so much the better. Last year, the FBI reported that people over the age of 60 were defrauded of $3.4 billion in wire fraud, up from $3.1 billion in 2022. As generative AI takes off — and voice acting with it — those numbers are poised to balloon.