O2 has created human-like AI ‘Granny’ to answer calls in real time from fraudsters, with the intention of keeping them on the phone and away from customers for as long as possible.
Daisy has been answering calls from scammers and having lifelike but meandering conversations with no input required from her creators.
Murray Mackenzie, Director of Fraud at Virgin Media O2, said: “We’re committed to playing our part in stopping the scammers, investing in everything from firewall technology to block out scam texts to AI-powered spam call detection to keep our customers safe.
“The newest member of our fraud-prevention team, Daisy, is turning the tables on scammers – outsmarting and outmanoeuvring them at their own cruel game simply by keeping them on the line.
Trained with the help of one of YouTube’s best known ‘scambaiters’, Jim Browning, Daisy combines various AI models that work together to first listen to the caller and transcribe their voice into text. Appropriate responses are then generated through a custom large language model complete with a character ‘personality’ layer, and then fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate a voice answer. This takes place in real time, allowing the tool to hold a human-like conversation with a caller.
By tricking the criminals into thinking they were defrauding a real person and playing on scammers biases about older people, Daisy has prevented them from targeting real victims and, most importantly, has exposed the common tactics used so customers can better protect themselves.
