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Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

I was just reviewing my call detail records on my "home" number yesterday, and realizing that the vast majority are spam - we pretty much don't answer that phone. This got me thinking about alternatives to even ringing for any unrecognised numbers, such as an IVR menu that said something like "Hi, we're screening spam, press 4 2 if you're a real person". I'm not sure how that'd be accepted by, for example, the dentist office though. Has anyone set something like that up?

I really hope Twilio is successful with this - it would definitely help, so long as there's a way to avoid abuse.

Just in case someone asks why I still have a "landline": it's VoIP, and I maintain it for basically two reasons:

* We use our VoIP number anytime we have to give a number out as part of signing up for something, rather than cell numbers

* It typically costs me under $25/year, which is actually mostly the 911 fee (oh, and it's an extra way to call 911, if we need to)

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>Has anyone set something like that up?

Yes! I did "Captcha for phone calls" for a school project earlier this year. It would play a quick message along the lines of "Hey, to ring my phone just enter these numbers: XYZ", and redirect the call to my phone if the captcha was correct.

The challenge was redirecting calls to the challenge even if they were originally directed to my phone number - the solution was to write a custom call handler (Android) that rejected calls if they weren't in my phone book, and then set up call-forwarding on rejected calls to go to a Twilio number with the challenge. There was a nice edge case where if I actually missed the call, it would just redirect you to the challenge again... but it was good enough for the class.

While testing, I accidentally actually got someone to use it! A guy repairing my watch called me, got directed to the challenge, and actually followed directions! Which was surprising to me. I also caught some obvious spam callers (same first 6 digits), and unsure if there were any other real people who did call and got confused or just hung up.

I've been meaning to clean up the code and publish it, but haven't gotten around to it - there's lots of hardcoded numbers in there.

(Disclosure: currently employed by Twilio)

Off topic: what kind of watch?

Tisell Bauhaus, a very plain and simple design (though not immune to being dropped, which is why I needed the repair).

I enabled call screening with Google Voice, where callers who are not in my contacts are asked to say their name before they are connected.

It completely weeds out robocalls, and no actual humans seem to have an issue with it. On the contrary, everyone sees why it's necessary.

I would love to try something like this, but living in the EU I can't use Google Voice.

Nomorobo is free for VOIP landlines, and pretty popular: https://www.nomorobo.com/

It has a whitelist/blacklist for common recorded messages like dentists, and then a CAPTCHA pretty much exactly what you describe: https://nomorobo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205761825-Wha...

I want my whitelist to exist exclusively on my phone, not in some central database of some company, regardless of how well-intentioned that company might be.

So, that makes solutions like Nomorobo not work so well for me.

> Has anyone set something like that up?

https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en works on several Android/Android One phones

I have an Anveo call flow[1] that implements a white/grey/black list setup that works great.

1. https://ibb.co/bBs2RsJ

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