I just got call from which it was obvious that the caller was reading from a prepared script. When I asked, "Are you a human being?," the reply was:
I am a human being, but I am only allowed to respond to specific questions.
I replied:
Does that mean that "Am I interrupting anything?" is not part of your script?
That was followed by dead silence. Speech recognition is clearly getting better, but it is still pretty easy to tell the difference between technology and a human being. Make a note of that, Alan Turing!
Check out nomorobo.com. Its creator was the winner of a government contest to block robocalls. He then created an implementation of his idea. It's not perfect, but it reduces robocalls to a single ring when it detects a call to block. You can add additional numbers to your list if you like. At the moment, this is only available if your line is implemented as VOIP or whatever cable systems do to simulate telephones. Of course, the carriers themselves should be implementing this, but that didn't seem to be an option.
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