In Australia, they create a chatbot to deceive scammers
Date: 2023-07-05 Author: Karina Ziganova Categories: IN WORLD
Australia's Macquarie University is developing a chatbot that will deliberately play for time with phone scammers
IT experts believe that such a chatbot will reduce the number of fraudulent calls.
AI vs. Scammers
A chatbot called Apate is built on the basis of artificial intelligence (AI) and supports several languages at once. His task is to maintain a long but meaningless conversation with a telephone scammer.
Dali Kaafar, a professor at Macquarie University, claims that the idea for a chatbot came to him when he himself encountered a phone scammer. During the conversation, which lasted almost an hour, Kaafar played for time in every possible way and did not give the attacker valuable information. After taking forty minutes of personal time from the fraudster, Kaafar realized that he needed to automate the process.
"Then I started thinking about how we could automate the whole process and use natural language processing to develop a computerized chatbot capable of having a believable conversation with a scammer," Kaafar said.
Apate was trained based on data from real-world scam conversations (from phone calls to email transcripts). Copies of real cases of fraud are necessary so that the chatbot can generate the most natural sentences that remind scammers of real conversations.
However, while the bot cannot keep the phone scammer on the wire for a long time. As stated in the press release, Apate manages to deceive scammers for no longer than five minutes. University experts hope to increase this figure to forty minutes
Kaafar and his development team are already in talks with a number of telecommunications service providers. However, the timing of the appearance of Apate on the commercial market is not specified
Where else are chatbots being developed?
In the wake of the popularity of chatbots, the NASA space agency is also developing its own AI-based bot. It will be tested at the Lunar Gateway, a planned international manned circumlunar station as part of the American Artemis program. It is expected that the bot will help astronauts control spacecraft.
The service for watching short TikTok videos should soon have its own chatbot. A novelty called Tako is implemented in the form of a built-in messenger. Users will be able to ask the chatbot questions on various topics and receive personalized recommendations
Among cryptocurrency projects, Polygon has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot called Polygon Copilot. The technology offers users information, analytics, and recommendations, and works with documentation on the Polygon protocol.
