What they should have done is enforce Caller ID identification labels for robocalls. For example, "Police Officers Benevolent Association [Robocall]".
A man can dream.
Of course. If I could I'd draw a salary from every employer on the planet. People be peoplin'.
When the robot talks to these spammers and telemarketers, it will try to keep them on the phone as long as possible. A minute would be good, 10 minutes would be better. As the spammers tried to avoid this, Apple and Google could improve the robots to counter.
And, within a few months of this, at most, that industry would just be dead. It can't afford to spend a half hour on each call trying to determine if they've got a real live knucklehead who will start sending cash to Nigerian princes, or just bad software tricking operators who don't speak English as a first language. Their margins would drop, their need for more sophisticated AI to try to determine if they were talking to a real person or not would skyrocket, etc. It just wouldn't be economically viable to continue.
Just looked up Robokiller...
>Robokiller is a phone app that blocks 99% of spam calls and texts with predictive analytics and audio fingerprinting.
Doesn't look like what I'm talking about at all. We don't want the calls to be blocked, we want them to linger on forever. I'm not sure why that's so difficult to understand.
You seem to think I was saying that I have this neat idea for an invention, and you're rebutting with "someone already thought of that".
I was describing "this needs to be a policy, if only a soft one, and only these two gigantic companies have the sway to do that". So you've totally misread things. It didn't click for you. That happen to you much? I guess I shouldn't ask, you wouldn't know even if that were the case.
> Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works.
The former is cheap enough that yes, they would engage for 15 minutes. The latter are smart enough to understand what's going on so that they'd hang up.
No, they wouldn't. This isn't "hey, when they call some random number and talk to a grandma that will never buy their stuff/scams, is wasting 15 minutes that once a big deal for them".
It's 15 minutes on every call, or enough that they can't filter down to those who will end up sending money.
> The latter are smart enough to understand what's going on so that they'd hang up.
That's debatable. But even if they are smart enough, please describe what logic you think they're using that they can tell pre-recorded voice responses from a live person? What exactly would go on in one of those calls? Did his "oh sure, uh huh" sound a little too much like the last one?
They're not supergeniuses.
You live in a tiny bubble if you honestly believe that.
"Eight-in-ten Americans say they don’t generally answer their cellphone when an unknown number calls" https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/12/14/most-amer...
And that study is from 3 years ago, it's surely a higher percentage now than it was then.
I don’t know why this is the hill you’ve chosen to die on
1. For non-emergencies, just use social media or email, which have better anti-spam filtration.
2. For most true emergencies, "hang up and call 911" just like every doctor's office recording says.
3. For urgent non-emergencies, either accept the consequences of waiting until your can reach the person via option #1 above, or get creative. Contact friends of the person and ask if they can get ahold of them... or someone IRL near them to get their real-world attention.
4. Consider what happens if you lose or break your phone. Responsible people let a reasonable group of people know how to reach them, and the rest contact a member of that group.
IDK, my iPhone will show me the live transcription of the callers message without me answering it. And then if I want to speak to them, I can answer the call in the middle of the message being left and talk to them.
Sounds cool, but this concept isn't at all new. Anyone who used answering machines did exactly this. You would listen to the message being left in real-time and pick up if you actually wanted to talk to them.
If people can't be bothered to leave a message, then that's their problem.
That's easy to say when you're not looking for a new job. Or don't run a business.
Not professional, not an option for some calls.
> If people can't be bothered to leave a message, then that's their problem.
It's actually my problem if I miss an important call. A message is great, sure, but I still missed the call.
Callers can't (well, shouldn't) expect to be able to reach you immediately by calling you. There's a lot of valid reasons to not answer your phone. You might be driving, you might be in the bathroom, you might be getting lunch in a noisy place, you might be in the middle of a different important conversation, etc.
At which point the caller needs to realize that the "professional" thing to do is leave a message if they want to be called back. (Or try calling again later.) Because there's enough junk calls that expecting people to call back every missed call that didn't leave a message is just unreasonable.
If I see that it's an important call, then I can pick up and answer right there mid-voicemail.
That's what I was referring to. They start talking when they leave the voicemail.
This is how we did it for a long time with home answering machines too. Except instead of reading a live transcription, you listened to their live recording, and could interrupt it and answer if you wanted to talk to them. It's not a new idea.
And not everybody has a phone that'll do this live message transcribing.
And no, everybody who decides to not leave a message isn't "not worth your time" or something.
I'm not convinced that STIR/SHAKEN even works properly. Recently, I migrated a DID from one VOIP provider to another. I set the outbound caller ID on the new provider, and it was showing up Verified with a checkmark to mobile devices before I had even submitted the port request to the old provider.
As long as they managed to attach the identity header to the sip invite correctly, and are not considered to be a shady actor - downstream providers such as carriers probably have no reason to label it as spam. Spam labeling is typically done via analytics, outsourced to third parties like First Orion.
Attest levels are not in themselves proper tools for spam detection. The real meat of stir shaken is the origid in the identity JWT claim which is an opaque identifier that can be traced back to a particular user/customer/network equipment.
STIR/SHAKEN being sold as the one and only solution for spam calls was a mistake as it is only one iteration in the right direction. You have a handful of RFCs and ATIS specs that the FCC told operators to implement in a phased approach, and ultimately some gaps were uncovered in practice that reduced its effectiveness.