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

On Thursday, the UK’s largest mobile network operator, O2, introduced a chatbot designed to frustrate phone scammers. Called “dAIsy,” it mimics an older woman with all kinds of time to chat – about knitting, her cat Fluffy – with the aim of keeping fraudsters endlessly engaged as they try obtaining her (fake) bank details.

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

It’s fun to see in practice. (O2 says the audio in the video below is real.) If it makes a dent, all the better. Last year, the FBI reported that people over age 60 were swindled out of $3.4 billion via telephone scams, up from $3.1 billion in 2022. With generative AI taking off — and voice impersonation with it — those numbers are poised to balloon.