Scammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, turning to artificial intelligence to better con their victims out of money. This includes using deepfakes to present themselves as someone else. Now, AI is being used in the fight back with telecom company O2 deploying an AI-powered granny in the battle.
Named Daisy, it is a new AI tool with the voice of a grandmother designed to talk with fraudsters and "waste as much of their time as possible". Basically, she rambles on about anything and everything to keep them away from real people.
According to O2 67% of British people are worried about falling victim to fraud and a quarter experience some degree of fraud every week. Daisy gives them a way to fight back and it has kept scammers on the phone for up to 40 minutes at a time.
Daisy has taken scammers on "meandering stories of her family, talked at length about her passion for knitting and provided exasperated callers with false personal information including made-up bank details."
How does Daisy work?
Daisy was built by the team at O2 using a custom-trained large language model with a 'character personality layer' to produce personalized responses.
It listens to the caller, transcribes it into text, sends that the LLM which generates the response and sends it back to the caller using text-to-speech. This is similar to the way Google Gemini Live works or the earlier version of ChatGPT Voice.
If you've ever had a conversation with Gemini Live or Meta AI Voice the experience will be fairly similar. It happens in real time with no noticeable delay.
The goal of the project is to keep the scammer on the phone for as long as possible by engaging them in a lifelike, but meandering conversation. This is done without any input from humans other than the responses from the scammer.
A video shared by O2 of Daisy in action suggests the scammers very quickly become frustrated and angry at the way it responds. This includes giving out fake bank account information and personal details.
Murray Mackenzie, Director of Fraud at Virgin Media O2, explained that Daisy is "turning the tables on scammers — outsmarting and outmaneuvering them at their own cruel game simply by keeping them on the line."
He recommends anyone in the UK worried about fraud to forward any call or text they suspect of being from a scammer to 7726 for free so it can be investigated.
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