The British operator O2 presented a “grandmother AI” to communicate with telephone scammers

The robot, called dAIsy, imitates an elderly woman who has time to chat (about knitting, about her cat Fluffy) with the aim of endlessly distracting scammers while they try to obtain her banking details. The “Granny AI”, as users immediately nicknamed her, is fake, the developers specify in a press release.

O2’s “AI Granny” combines “several artificial intelligence models.” Some convert the caller’s voice to text, some generate a response using a large language model, and some convert it to speech. It is known that Jim Browning, an expert in “baiting” for scammers with a large number of subscribers on YouTube, participated in the development and training of the bot.

Last year, the FBI reported that $3.4 billion was stolen from people over 60 through phone scams, up from $3.1 billion in 2022. With the development of generative AI and voice simulations, the numbers will grow even higher. further.

In Russia, such a robot would also be useful. According to Sberbank, up to 15 million fraudulent calls are made in the country every day, if we count instant messaging services (attackers actively hack them). And according to estimates of the legal service “Unified Protection Center”, the number of victims has increased by 72% since 2015. In September 2024, damage caused by fraudulent activities reached almost 250 billion rubles.