Macquarie University in Australia has created a chatbot designed to apprehend phone scammers. Experts say it could help reduce the number of fraudulent calls.
Dali Kaafar, a professor at Macquarie University, was the one who came up with Apate, a chatbot based on AI (artificial intelligence) technology. Its main purpose is to maintain a non-content but lengthy conversation with phone scammers.
This idea occurred to him when he was having a telephone conversation with such a person, which lasted almost an hour, all the while he was putting off communicating useful details. To avoid such long conversations in the future, Professor Kaafar thought of creating a computer chatbot with a natural language processing function that could talk to scammers and save his own precious time.
"That's when I started thinking about how I could automate everything and use natural language processing to create a computer chatbot that could have a realistic dialogue with the scammer," said Kaafar.
Apate's training was based on footage of real scams (from phone calls to email transcripts). Duplicates of real fraud cases are needed so that the robot can formulate as realistic sentences as possible, provoking real discussions with fraudsters.
So far, however, the chatbot has not been able to keep a phone scammer on the line for an extended period of time. According to an official statement, Apate can fool scammers for no more than five minutes.
Kaafar and his development team are currently in talks with various telecom companies. Unfortunately, it has not yet been determined when Apate will be available in shops.
In light of chatbot trends, the Space Agency NASA has created its own AI-driven robot to be tested on Lunar Gateway, the international manned near-lunar station that is part of the Artemis programme. This chatbot is supposed to help astronauts navigate spacecraft.
TikTok should soon have a Tako chatbot for broadcasting short videos. This technology will allow customers to ask questions on different topics and receive personalised advice.
Polygon, a cryptocurrency project, recently introduced its AI-powered chatbot Polygon Copilot, which provides users with information, analytics and advice, as well as documentation on the Polygon protocol.
