369K views · Jan 27, 2015 · 14:05 · 1 HN recommender · 6 mentions · discussed 2017–2023
A recorded phone call in which the Lenny bot, a looping set of prerecorded replies from a rambling old man, keeps a telemarketer on the line for 14 minutes. The uploader calls it the best Lenny call yet.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN mentions it as an example of Lenny, the telemarketer time-waster, and of how a canned script can fool callers for a long time.
“There are some amazingly long calls.”
Slow rambling old man recording keeps telemarketers on the line
There's a whole series of this where it's a recording of an old man who talks really slow, can't hear well, needs things re-explained, rambles a bit, etc. There are some amazingly long calls. this video
“There's a funny series on YouTube”
Prerecorded old man keeps asking questions and going off track
Even completely prerecorded scripts can keep them on the phone for over 10 minutes. There's a funny series on YouTube, "Lenny", where they just play a recording of an old man who keeps asking questions and going off track: this video
Lenny bot as basis for a proposed project
Someone can enhance lenny's spammer chat bot this video to support: Multiple voices, and pass the phone between Lenny, his nurse, family members, etc. Create "Spammer Turning award" for the best Lenny spammer chat bot that can get caller stay the longest. That will be the ethical AI project I love to support.
“it fooled some callers for a surprisingly long time.”
Fixed-script answering program fooled callers for long
A few years a back someone had the genius idea of making a robo-answering phone program that would give vague but encouraging replies when it received some unsolicited sales pitch. Although it was a fixed sequence of responses, it fooled some callers for a surprisingly long time. this video Someone needs to hook create the plumbing to capture speech to text, feed it to a GPT script that has been told how to reply to such call center calls, then send that back through a TTS generator like this one. To overcome any latency issues, it could build in a ploy to buy time like the old script did, eg, make the robo-answerer sound like a somewhat addled old man who has to think before each reply, perhaps prefixing responses with "hmm, ahh, ..." to buy time to generate the response.
“it fooled the sales people for surprisingly long”
Canned vague replies fooled sales people for long
I pitched this on a recently thread, but it was 12+ hours after it was posted, so I'll try again here. What I really want is a program to waste the time of phone calls making unsolicited sales pitches. It would do voice to text, run a simple language model to generate responses, then synthesize the voice back. It doesn't need to be a sophisticated model, not much more sophisticated than the classic "Eliza" program. A few years back someone did this with a canned loop of vague responses and it fooled the sales people for surprisingly long: this video It seems like it could all run locally for low latency. Probably the most important part to get right would be a TTS system that isn't immediately pegged as a robot.
Lenny: link this video link Also, I highly recommend the movie, "Sorry to Bother You": link SORRY TO BOTHER YOU | Official Trailer: link With David Cross playing Cash's "white voice"! The Art Of The White Voice by David Cross and Patton Oswalt (Sorry to Bother You): link Watch Lakeith Stanfield Use His ‘White Voice’ in ‘Sorry to Bother You’ | Anatomy of a Scene: link
