I don't care if it is for profit, non-profit, Democratic Party, Republican Party, Monster Raving Loonie Party, or my local NPR station, I am fucking sick to fucking death of telemarketers, and I want to destroy their companies. (The ordinary employees of telemarketers are in a bad situation, working crappy jobs, for little money, so I wish them better jobs, and permission to kick their supervisors in the crotch)
Well, I was doing some texting via voice recognition on my Android phone, and I realized that smartphones have become amazingly capable at such things.
They also do credible speech generation, though I have not been able to find a Brooklyn accent voice for Google maps.
Well, since the 1966, there has been various levels of natural language processing on computers, most notably Eliza, and the state of the art has advanced significantly over the years.
Given all of this, I would like to see an app developed to specifically torture telemarketers. You get the call, and you select a specific personality, like, "Harried Mom", or "In the middle of a home invasion", or (my favorite idea this far) "heavily accented south Asian tech support personnel", or (for political fundraisers) "the anarcho-syndicalist Dennis from Month Python and the Holy Grail."
The idea, of course, is that instead of just hanging up, the program strings them along for 5-15 minutes. Suddenly the cost of annoying me on the phone increases by a factor of 10 or 20, and all I have to do is boot up the app.
In any case, I have a couple of questions:
- The first is whether such an application, even if it never stores the contents call, would violate various wiretap statutes that prohibit surreptitious recording?
- Should there be functionality to invoke a human operator when receiving robocalls?
- Many carriers (and Apple) seem to forbid any app interaction with calls. Is there a way to structure this app to avoid this, or should I start lobbying my congressman for a law allowing for this?
- Would you be interested in such an app?
- Is a kit that would allow this to plug into a land line a good accessory>
I know that this is only barely politics, but after a the last political cycle, I am sick to death of all forms of telemarketing. (Hell, after my 15th encounter with a robocall telling me to vote against gay marriage, I was willing to marry a guy just to piss them off).
*Yes, I know that fsck is actually a *nix command to run a check of the file system, but I you know what I really meant.