What I do not understand is, given that the phone is a computer, why there is not an on-phone IVR which can solicit a brief intro. I mean, I had tech that could do that for a landline 25 years ago.
if I don’t know the caller they can leave a voicemail. If it’s not important enough for a voicemail, it’s not important.
If it just deleted old entries then it's possible someone left an important message and assume you'll hear it but then it just gets silently deleted.
Imagine if PC storage devices worked this way, it'd be chaos.
I get calls from scammers occasionally, but they don't ever leave VM.
I actually called the number the CRA one left back once and a person with a French accent answered pretending to be from the CRA. I just said if they called my number again I was going to report them to the rcmp and then hung up. It stopped for a few months after that. I'm assuming if it was actually Canada revenue, they would have called back. All I was getting were the Cantonese ones. The CRA ones only started again recently.
Google has that, but I'm not sure if it's on-phone.
I'd wager someone could write an app to do this.
I would probably pay $50 for an on-phone version of Lenny; basically a voice-based chat-bot that keeps spammers occupied, without having to conference another number in.
( https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny... )
I use it for every number I don't know, and so far it's been 100% successful (in the sense that, afaik, no one who I wanted to hear from has hung up on Google Assistant).
You can set the spam calls to be answered with selected funny time-wasting recordings, but since that would be embarrassing if I get a call from a professional contact, I set them to be answered with a plain fax tone.
Now I am back to being able to pick up all calls that ring.
(My opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.)
What I want, though, is an interactive bot, running on my phone, that will eat up telemarketer's time by pretending to be a real person, and responding to them in such a way as to keep them on the line for as long as possible.
I want to pick up a call from a scumbag, tell them, "hang on, let me get my dad", and press the "fuck you" button - which puts a fake doddering old man on the line for them to talk to instantly, without any more intervention required from me.
I ported my landline number to Callcentric partially just to rid myself of the AT & T $75/mo charge and partially because of Callcentric's call handling.
Callcentric (and I'm sure others) allow call routing rules which include inputs for spam ranking, whitelist and IVR routing. You can upload your contacts, whitelist those for passthrough and then send anyone else to a simple "please press <fixed digit|random digit> " prompt first before routing to you if they pass the test.
https://www.thetelecomspot.com/grandstream-ht801.html
If you prefer to own the hardware yourself, it's possible to do the same by loading asterisk on a raspberry pi.
Set up your voicemail answering message to contain only two things: the tones that signify "This Phone Number Not In Use" (see http://www.k3pgp.org/telezap.htm) and a terse voice message, such as "Leave a Message", which imparts no usable information to the caller.
Now when the call goes to voicemail, two things happen: First, any robocallers will hang up when the hear the 'Not in Use' tones. Second, any humans will hear the 'Leave a Message' and they now have two options which are to hang up, or to leave a message asking you to call back.
You merely have to scan the voicemail messages and call back only those ones you choose to answer. The other 80% or more have been discarded 'automatically' before you get to hear them.
I believe Google Voice has this option. You enable it and it records them saying who they are, which is played to you to accept or reject.
(And yes, I would probably be juggling significant state at the usual calling times; pushing and popping all that is far more than 5 seconds, even if that were completely lossless)
Ideally, you should be alerted that your position on the waitlist is approaching so that you know to answer any incoming calls in case it's "the one". I have no idea if this reflects reality however.
I'm not sure the false hope would be an improvement. Unfortunately there are a whole bunch of emotional considerations that need to be made in this case.
Once the phone companies fix caller authentication, I'll probably be comfortable letting my guard down a bit. Correct caller ID would make my phone far more valuable and I'm always surprised that the big telecom companies don't compete on voice services more.
Edit: all good points. Yeah I guess that is a risk.
Also reminds me of this:
That's not even considering mundane everyday stuff like delivery people/repair people who got lost or have to reschedule last minute. You might have the main number for the business whitelisted, but those sorts of calls usually come from the phone number of the day's driver.
The only people who think "just disable incoming phone calls" is a viable option either have no friends and/or family, very little life experience, or both.
Unfortunately the 2FA calls for my corporate login seem to come from different numbers each time..
Do we know if people actually try twice in rapid succession often enough during emergencies, without special training to develop that habit?
I don't know the data on this, but I'd like to.
The only people who think "just disable incoming phone calls" is not a viable option either have no decent friends and/or family, very little life experience, or both.
I can tell you that calls from 911 don't come from the phone number '911'.
This is much better than the old days of phone-only contact.