Surely that's not a granny? UK operator O2 has created an AI bot that mimics a grandmother and fights phone scammers

UK operator O2 has unveiled an innovative chatbot called Daisy, which mimics the voice and mannerisms of an elderly woman to keep phone scammers on the line.

Here's What We Know

The bot, which was created using advanced artificial intelligence technology, is able to carry on long conversations, distracting scammers and preventing them from trying to scam real people. Daisy uses a combination of different AI models to listen to calls, further converts the scammers' speech into text and generates responses with a "personality" character layer, which are then converted back into voice messages.

As a result, the chatbot sounds like a real person, making it an effective tool in the fight against fraud. O2 has added the AI number to "easy target" lists to attract the attention of fraudsters. In testing, Daisy successfully kept real fraudsters on the line for 40 minutes or more by telling them fictional stories and providing false personal information, as described in the video below.

The project was developed with Jim Browning, one of YouTube's most notorious scammers, and aims to protect vulnerable people, especially the elderly, from phone scammers.

Source: VirginMedia