O2 launches AI “grandma” to keep fraudsters on the line

The AI grandmother has reportedly kept numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a time.

O2, a UK telecoms operator owned by Richard Branson’s Virgin Media, has employed a new strategy to combat scammers, aiming to beat them at their own game.

The company has created “Daisy,” a human-like AI ‘Granny’ which answers fraudsters' calls in real time.

According to O2, AI Granny’s mission is to talk with scammers and waste as much of their time as possible with human-like chat to keep them away from real people.

Daisy, which was reportedly trained by one of YouTube’s best-known scam baiters, Jim Browning, combines various AI models to listen and respond to fraudulent calls.

Responses are then generated through a custom large language model complete with a character personality layer and then fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate a voice answer.

O2 claims that Daisy has kept numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a time.

“AI Scambaiter has told frustrated scammers 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,” the company says.

According to O2 statistics, 69% of Brits reported that they’d been targeted by scammers.