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Comment by antonf | Hacker News Reader

Can filtering out robocallers be solved through technology? Similarly to how Spam folder in your email app works. I have zero knowledge about how telecom works, but it seems not too complex.

Also, it seems that iOS have support for third party apps helping to block spam calls: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207099 Android have this feature built-in: https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/3459196?hl=en

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I've noticed that almost all of the robocalls i receive come from a number beginning with the same three numbers as my number. I would love for the ability to block all calls beginning with these three numbers, UNLESS they are already on my contacts list. This would solve 95% of robocalls for me and wouldn't have too much of a negative impact.

Although I could imagine the impact for people who receive many unknown calls from their own area code would be non-negligible.

> I've noticed that almost all of the robocalls i receive come from a number beginning with the same three numbers as my number. I would love for the ability to block all calls beginning with these three numbers, UNLESS they are already on my contacts list.

Hiya (and presumably other solutions, but I've used Hiya extensively) does this.

you're a lifesaver; glad I asked!

This will become unhelpful as soon as it becomes sufficiently popular (perhaps even before: as the trick gets more widely recognized for what it is, the mental spam filters it hacks around will get updated whether or not they are augmented with technological tools, and the practice will lose its value and be abandoned, making automated filtering that assumes it is widely used more likely to screen out good calls than spam.)

There's a protocol being worked on called STIR/SHAKEN to address robocalls [0]. It's more like website / browser certificate PKI than spam filtering. Some of the major US telcos are working toward implementation already.

[0] https://transnexus.com/whitepapers/understanding-stir-shaken...

Yes, if you can get your system "in the middle". I would love to have an automated system that says, "please say your name and why you're calling and I will connect you", then relays that information to me, and I can choose to accept or reject the call. After a certain phone number has been accepted they wont have to hear that message again, so family and friends can reach me directly. That system would be 98% effective, and it doesn't even use machine learning! Problem is you cannot reasonably get a system like that "in the loop", you have no way to intercept calls, the phone service providers wont let you.

You could set up some elaborate system to proxy your calls through a call forwarding service, and then only give out the proxy number to people, but that wouldn't stop anyone who randomly calls your directly number and would be a big hassle to set up.

I've considered hacking something like this together for myself, except if I'm the only one doing it I can do something even simpler and just have the system say "please press 6 to be connected". The robocalls will be to dumb to figure it out, thus no more robocalls.

Google Pixel phones have exactly that: call screening.

When you receive a call you can let the phone ask what the call is about and it will locally transcribe what they say back so you can decide whether or not to pick up.

Offline???

As in locally, not sent to Google.

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