Toao.net
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2017–2023
14:05 · 369K views · Jan 27, 2015
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.
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.
6 comments from Hacker News
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
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
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.
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]