Quote:Hello, this is Lenny!

We’ve talked quite a bit about telephone fraud on our blog — those fake Microsoft tech support guyswho try to scare you with malware into paying for their service, or the fake cops who say your kid is in trouble. Everybody hates them, regardless of whether they ever fell for the scam. At the 35C3 hacker congress, I happened to be at a talk that mentioned an amazing solution to all those phone scam problems. That solution has a name: Meet Lenny.

Lenny is a rather unsophisticated voice chatbot that simply reads its lines one by one when the caller pauses for a while. Lenny has several minutes of those lines recorded by a talented elderly voice actor. After it reads the last line, it just starts over. But it sounds so realistic that telemarketers continue talking to Lenny for dozens and dozens of minutes.

What keeps them hooked? Well, on the one hand, Lenny has some generic phone phrases like “Sorry, I can barely hear you,” “Are you there?” and “Yes,” that are good for any topic, and on the other hand, it can ingeniously and smoothly redirect the conversation to other topics that have nothing to do with the original subject — family, a very smart daughter — and makes all those phone scammers and telemarketers listen to it chatter about them. Here’s a sample call to Lenny:

Full reading: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/35c3-lenny-voice-chatbot/25275/