O2 unleashes AI grandma on scammers

Research by British telecommunications provider O2 has found that seven in ten Britons (71 percent) would like to take revenge on scammers who have tried to trick them or their loved ones. At the same time, however, one in two people does not want to waste their time on it.

AI grandma against telephone scammers

O2 now wants to remedy this with an artificial intelligence called Daisy. As the “head of fraud prevention”, it’s the job of this state-of-the-art AI granny to keep scammers away from real people for as long as possible with human-like chatter. To activate Daisy, O2 customers simply have to forward a suspicious call to the number 7726.

Daisy combines different AI models that work together to first listen to the caller and convert their voice to text. It then generates responses appropriate to the character’s “personality” via a custom single-layer large language model. These are then fed back via a custom text-to-speech model to generate a natural language response. This happens in real-time, allowing the tool to have a human-like conversation with a caller.

Although human-like is a strong understatement: Daisy was trained with the help of Jim Browning, one of the most famous “scambaiters” on YouTube. With the persona of a lonely and seemingly somewhat bewildered older lady, she tricks the fraudsters into believing that they have found a perfect target, while in reality she beats them with their own weapons.