Nuisance phone calls could disappear with the help of a virtual assistant that screens out spammers before the phone even rings.
Robocalls, in which an automated recording pretends to be a human, are a common problem 鈥� there are in the US alone. Simple block lists can screen some of these calls out, but they are only around , says Sharbani Pandit at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
In an attempt to do better, Pandit and her colleagues have created a virtual assistant that operates as a buffer between the call-maker and recipient. If a number isn鈥檛 in a phone鈥檚 contact list, it is diverted to the assistant. There, the caller is asked to state the recipient鈥檚 name. 鈥淎 person who knows my name is calling with a good intention 鈥� or they鈥檙e not typical robocallers,鈥� says Pandit.
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If the caller responds, the virtual assistant interrupts them, saying 鈥淪orry I didn鈥檛 get that. Can you please say who you are trying to reach again?鈥�. While a robocaller probably won鈥檛 notice the question, a human is likely to stop talking. If they do, the virtual assistant passes on the call via an app, along with a transcribed name.
When tested on around 8000 recorded robocalls, the system blocked every single one. A further test with 21 human participants, where the callers engaged with the virtual assistant but occasionally used the wrong name, was 97.8 per cent effective.
The technology is similar to Google Duplex, an automated voice assistant that can book restaurant reservations by phone on behalf of a user, though instead acts on incoming calls, rather than outgoing ones.
鈥淚t鈥檚 like a spam filter that checks that the sender has at least minimal knowledge about the addressee and is flexible enough to produce that knowledge on request,鈥� says David Schlangen at the University of Potsdam, Germany, of the new assistant. He says the system could be circumvented but that call spammers are unlikely to bother.
Shujun Li at the University of Kent, UK, disagrees. 鈥淭he proposed system does not look significantly complicated enough to prevent criminals from tweaking their systems easily,鈥� he says.
Pandit says a future version of the virtual assistant will be able to ask further questions about the nature of the call, potentially allowing you to avoid difficult or unwanted conversations with humans.
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