Telemarketers, like tax collectors and the members of Nickelback, are people who have jobs that nobody likes. You don't like talking to them, they can be hard to get rid of and some people (myself included) feel weird about simply hanging up on them.
Roger Anderson was getting "four or five calls a day" from telemarketers, according to an interview he did with a radio station in San Francisco, "and they never stop." So he decided to get clever. He created a robot that would answer calls for him.
It began with a simple audio response, he says in his blog post that explains the creation process. He started with a sound file that would say things like, "Hello?" and "Hang on a sec," with some silence added in for good measure. Seeing success with that, he decided to take the parrot concept further.
Now the robot is more sophisticated, recognizing when another human is on the call and listening for the silent pauses that inevitably come in all telemarketing scripts. It will respond with a lot of mundane answers like, "yes," "uh-huh" and "right." More impressively, "when it thinks the caller is suspicious, it says something completely inane."
Responses include phrases like, "I'm having trouble concentrating because you sound exactly like somebody I went to high school with. So sorry, say that part again?"
or "I just woke up from a nap and I'm kind of groggy." The entire thing is designed not just to help you avoid telemarketing calls, but to explicitly waste a telemarketer's time and money.
He has posted many interactions with the robot to his YouTube page.
Predictably, if the person on the other end of the call figures this out (which seems to take some people a long while), their response is something along the lines of "Mother f-----." One telemarketer, who could tell he was being toyed with but didn't understand that he wasn't talking to a human, threatened to give out the phone number of the person he called to other angry would-be customers.
So how does this help you?
Anderson has opened the doors to the Jolly Roger Telephone Company to everyone, and right now it can be used free of charge.
As the website says, all you need to do the next time a telemarketer calls you is this:
- Press "add call"
- Dial the robot at 214-666-4321. While you're dialing, keep chatting into your phone like you're trying to get Mr. Jones ("yeah - phone for you", "okay, he's coming hang on...", etc)
- Press "Add call" or "Merge call" or "Conference" or whatever will add the robot to the conversation.
- MUTE YOURSELF so your background noise doesn't affect the conversation.
- Listen to the call, and hang up when the telemarketer hangs up.
Local readers will recognize that 214 area code as native to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He is local? No, Anderson confirmed via a Facebook chat.
"I figured Texas would be friendly in case the telemarketers got mad at me," he joked. "'I'm in Texas, come and get me!'"
Good enough for me. I think we can accept the robot as an honorary Texan, based on what he's willing to do for us.
Anderson adds, "This just started as a hobby and I never expected so much traffic to it!"
Running the robot just for himself is doable, but giving more and more people access has proven costly, especially since it's attracted attention from sites like Gizmodo and Yahoo! Tech. According to blog posts, his disk space for recording calls keeps running out, and the bandwidth needed to handle calls from all over the world has taken a toll on the poor robot, leading to at least one period where it needed a break.
Anderson has tried to compensate by asking for Paypal donations on his website. Now, though, he's started a Kickstarter where he's asking for a total of $46,000 to build a monthly service around the robot vs. telemarketer concept.
He also asks that you resist the temptation to just use the robot as a way to prank your friends. His war is with shady telemarketing companies, not your aunt.
