Roger Anderson's a phone guy. He builds those audio menus companies use when you call in (press one for Spanish...two for sales...etc.)
But Anderson's pet peeve is telemarketers. And when one of them used a some bad words on the phone with his son, he decided to do something about it. He writes on his blog that he set up a system designed to confuse robo-dialers that called his house by repeating "Hello? Hello? Hello?" over and over:
And it worked like a champ! So then I thought “hmmmmm, how far can I take this parrot?”
I then created a fairly sophisticated algorithm that performs a handshake (hello? hello?), then engaged (yes, uh huh, right), then when it thinks the caller is suspicious, it says something completely inane. If the caller stops talking and there’s a long silence, it goes back to handshake. There’s a bit more to it, but that’s pretty much the general idea. As you’ll hear from the calls on this blog, it has been working like a champ!
So I modified the emails to include a link to send calls to this robot. And to prevent telemarketers from getting suspicious and hitting the robot again if they called back, I added a 1 hour delay before it would answer again. If they call back within an hour, they get a disconnect message.
The bot loops through a series of complaints about being tired, the caller talking too fast, and even a bee landing on its arm. (You can also set up your phone to transfer telemarketers to the Roger-bot. Instructions are at the bottom of this article.)
People end up in amazingly long conversations with the bot, which Anderson records and puts up on his site. He told Studio 10 Australia that he's tried to make it smarter and more complicated, but callers tend to stay on the line longest with his original, "stupid" version (video below).
Here are some great examples:
