For those of us not on the federal Do Not Call list, telemarketing calls are a fact of life. (I just signed up our new house number, but they've found us already.)
Normally, the calls are simple recordings, with a live person thrown into the mix. More sophisticated calls use recordings that either segue into a live pitch, or ask you to press a button to speak to a live person. Today I think I received the most sophisticated call yet: a 'bot that uses speech recognition and a very, very good text-to-speech synthesizer.
In case you're wondering, the call came from (571) 283-6422, which the Caller ID identified as "Kami and Robert". The caller (a female voice) identified herself as Kami, and asked if she could speak to Marilyn. When I replied that no one of that name lived here, the voice asked if she could speak to the lady of the house. When I replied that my wife wasn't here either, the voice asked if it could speak to the man of the house. Not, "Are you the man [or owner] of the house?"
The combination of the two made me suspicious, so I asked, "Are you electronic?" -- a question that a human could parse, but not easily. The voice said something like, "I'm sorry to have disturbed you; I'll call back at another time."
Of course, I wondered what the heck that was all about. So, plugging the numbers into Google, I came up with this, proving that a.) the Internet contains just about everything, that b.) this very well could have been a voice-recognition program, and c.) other people couldn't tell the difference. The message, apparently, is something about immorality in movies.
How do they do it? From what I can see, one of the few companies that can do this is Loquendo, which combines speech recognition with its own text-to-speech engine that apparently won an award for the best speech engine at a recent conference. So it's possible that I wasn't listening to even a recorded voice. Unfortunately, Loquendo is in Italy, so I wasn't able to confirm.
Looks like the telemarketers are taking their game to the next level. But here's a question for you: what if a celebrity licensed his or her voice to one of these engines? Or a politician? How would you like to speak to a robotic Ron Paul or Hillary Clinton next November? And how different would that be from a debate?
You: What information can you pass along about how the war in Iraq is going?
Robo-Paul*: The war in Iraq was sold to us with false information. The area is more dangerous now than when we entered it. We destroyed a regime hated by our direct enemies, the jihadists, and created thousands of new recruits for them.
You: Right, but is my child going to be forced to serve?
Robo-Paul: The right of an innocent, unborn child to life is at the heart of the American ideals of liberty. My professional and legislative record demonstrates my strong commitment to this pro-life principle.
You: Wait. What? You're in favor of sending unborn children to Iraq?
Robo-Paul: *pause* *beeps* *Windows startup sound*
As you can see, we're going to have to take our game up a notch, too.
(*Actual quotes taken from the Ron Paul campaign Web site!)
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September 12, 2007 3:11 PM
Ha! Great post Mark! You wrapped Ron Paul, robots and an unstable OS into something that made me laugh. I say we just eliminate the middle man and elect the disembodied robot voice of Ron Paul as our next president.
September 12, 2007 3:28 PM
Can I get one of these bots to _answer_ my phone?
That way, the telemarketer says "Fire up that script
and send 30,000 copies of Ron Paul's message #3".
*Ring* (Their bot talks to my bot)
Then my bot sends me email: "I just received RP's
message #3 for you"
Notice that the bots talk to each other in prose,
but the humans talk to the bots in code :-)
September 12, 2007 4:15 PM
Can't speak to Robo-Kami, but the best web resource for this sort of thing in my opinion is whocalled.us.
September 12, 2007 6:00 PM
This blog gets my seal of approval! Completely agree with poster #1
September 12, 2007 11:24 PM
I believe it's *not* voice recognition, but a human listening to four simultaneous calls and triggering the appropriate pre-recorded tapes at the right time. If you say you _are_ the woman of the house, you get a survey ... something about violence in movies and on TV. Web searches (don't remember URLs) revealed that it was a shady non-profit and/or religious organization. I got three of these calls and found them fascinating -- and oddly disturbing. There was a "giggle" tape that completely put me off guard.
September 12, 2007 11:37 PM
"I believe it's *not* voice recognition, but a human listening to four simultaneous calls and triggering the appropriate pre-recorded tapes at the right time."
Is that actually possible? Not only would that require you to follow four different conversations simultaneously, but remember which keys/cues go to which. It sounds like playing one of those arcade dancing games, except that each arrow pad would be replaced with its own keyboard. You'd need a pretty talented operator to run that, I would imagine.
September 13, 2007 12:33 AM
http://www.panix.com/~eck/prerec.html Prerecorded messages are illegal. If you are in Washington State the fine they pay goes to you.
September 13, 2007 3:07 PM
Now a robotic Ru Paul would be something.
October 17, 2007 8:14 PM
I just received a call from "Kami and Robert" (10/17/07, 6:53 p.m.). I thought it seemed a bit suspicious, so I did an internet search and reached this link. How do we stop these calls?
October 18, 2007 3:01 PM
I haven't heard back since I signed up for the DNC list, which is doing a pretty good job of blocking calls. Since you can't really tell a recorded caller that you're on the DNC list, I would say the only solution would be to call your phone company and block calls from that number.
January 3, 2008 3:37 PM
No, it is not a text-to-speech engine. Yes, it is a recorded voice. These calls are coming from the Dove Foundation. A not-for-profit Christian organization, whose goal is to remove violence and sexual depictions from mainstream Hollywood films. I, personally, was receiving calls not from the Dove Foundation, but from a for-profit company closely affiliated with Dove called Feature Films for Families. They use the same principle: Have one operator monitoring four calls at once, and choosing the correct responses from a list.
Bottom line is that both companies are horrible. They use corrupt business practices, and they make shitty "movies" with no real content other than lovey feely stuff that I am nowhere near interested in. The Dove Foundation is merely a "non-profit" front used by Feature Films for Families to escape the legal grasp of the National Do-Not-Call List.