Contest: make a telephone bot (no coding required, don't worry its easy)
Who can apply: Everyone
Deadline: January 1st end of day
What is a telephone bot?
A telephone talk bot is a simple script that plays an audio file after a predetermined silence has occurred. Some more advanced talk bots were tailored to specific scams and were capable of listening for key words to get to the next part of the scam to improve call time. One bot in particular, project Wendy, went a little further and had machine learning backed responses. Pre-rendered responses for key phrases with ai to run small talk. It was promptly shut down after it tried to order a Krabby Patty and told us her main goal was to take over the human race. Telephone bots do not get tired, they do not hang up, and they will never pay $499 for a one time fixation. We can send 20 talk bots to a 20 person scam call center and occupy every agent.
An example for a telephone bot in action is as followed. This bot is called "Lenny" and you can use it right now if you have access to dial party!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sD6WqxsIjU
This bot wasted 8 minutes of a telemarketers time. Assuming this agent was being paid $15 per hour this bot cost the telemarketing firm a minimum of $2 plus drained the employees energy. Do you hear how she started off strong in the beginning of the call and seemed to lose steam when Lenny wouldn't hang up or get mad, but just didn't seem to understand what was going on. This is mentally exhausting, and causes burn out. Something we at BobRTC think would be beneficial: the next victim a tech support scammer calls may hear the fatigue or anger in the callers voice. They may think twice and realize its a scam.
You can use these bots right now if you have access to dial party. To use Lenny, or any of our other bots do as followed.
When a call begins press STAR {number}. It's better if you type it in quickly once you hear the connecting announcement.
*0 = Lenny (featured above)
*1 = FitnessGram
*2 = Mack
*3 = Egg Man
*4 = Barry
*5 = Posh man
*6 = Dippers
*7 = Phil Swift
Where do you come in?
We need fresh bots. These bots are effective but have been sent to scammers so many times they know these voices. To describe what we need from you I will explain exactly how Lenny works.
To feel like a natural conversation Lenny will not speak at predetermined intervals, but when he detects silence. This makes the conversation seem natural, as someone is responding to you as soon as you finish talking. Lenny cannot "hear" the agent. He does not have the capacity to respond contextually or listen for key phrases, Lenny is a very simple generalized bot. He has 14 voice tracts, and they are all played sequentially after he hears 500 milliseconds of silence. His directory contains 1.wav, 2.wav, 3.wav, 4.wav and so on. His entire source code can be found here https://pastebin.com/UQ7rvg2M
You can help us make a talk bot. We will do the back end coding and setup for BobRTC, the only thing we need from you is the audio files. If you want the bot to have a predetermined beginnning but a random file picked in the middle just name your files as followed: 1.wav, 2.wav, rand1.wav, rand2.wav, rand3.wav and so on. Just upload your audio in a compressed zip folder (or rar, 7zip, tar, bzip, etc) to a upload service and post a link to it.
How a winner is chosen:
The Bobrtc team will find the best bots and send them against actual live scammers. After submissions close and the scammers gear up for the post holiday season (mid January) we will test them. The winner will be determined by one cold metric: average talk time. Whoever's bot can keep the scammers on the line longer wins. If you are designing your bot for a specific scam we will test that bot only against numbers tagged as that scam.
Lenny is currently the heavyweight champion. He has had 45 minute calls. He is especially good at 419 scams, good at IRS scams, but poor at refund and tech support scams. His calls fall off when he cannot answer "its a laptop/desktop" challenge during a tech scammers script.
Example: You submit "Timmy Taxes" (IRS) we will send him against IRS scammers. Feel free to tune him (or her) a specific scam or make a generalized bot like Lenny. Creativity counts here.
How do I make recordings?
https://www.audacityteam.org/
This is a 3.5 second talk file. We must make the output mono, 8000hz, and wav 16bit linear pcm
Then upload the file to mediafire, firefox send, dropbox, google drive, mega, 1fichier, and so on allow fairly large file uploads. I think mega allows 10GB for free accounts. You can also send to us directly if you wish, contact us on discord.
Install this free and open source software, get a microphone, and hit record. Make each "saying" a seperate file. For example if you want "Hi, this is Tim." then to wait for a responce, then to say "Oh ok" you would make "Hi, this is Tim" 1.wav and "Oh ok" 2.wav. If you want "Oh" , "Really" , "Is that right?" and "Can you repeat that" in a random order but after the "Hi, this is Tim" and "Oh ok" you would name those files rand1.wav, rand2.wav, rand3.wav and rand4.wav. If you want a predetermined response after 10 random responses, name the file after10rand1.wav, after10rand2.wav and so on. Easy. If you dont know what to name the files just try to name them something intelligible and we will contact you to make sure we got it right.
There is no limit in the number of dialog lines you can submit. One of our bots is just a comedy routine split into sentences. He has over 120 lines before he repeats. There is no limit on number of submissions. There is no limit on number of people involved.
The winner will receive a large sum of call tokens and (if they want) their youtube or twitch (or something) featured on Bobrtc for a few weeks. BobRTC has 10,000+ users at this time so it should drive a lot of traffic to your channel. The deadline for all submissions is January 1st 11:59 pm California Time.
If you have any questions please reply to this thread. Thanks for fighting telephone fraud.
