I second that proposal. Or at least make all the FCC decider phone numbers public so I can robocall them until they make it illegal. And WTF does AI have to do with it. A non-AI generated but human or digitally created voice is somehow acceptable? There are plenty of voice actors that sound like Taylor Swift or Joe Biden.
It's the difference between charging one fraudster vs charging one fraudster plus one voice impersonator. It's also not clear that current laws against impersonation do cover digitally assisted impersonation.
Too bad you forgot to uncheck that box that kept rechecking itself at every step of checkout last time you bought a thing online agreeing that the store and all their business and marketing partners could contact you.
A blanket cutoff is ill advised in my opinion. I think it has to depend on the intent behind the phone call. For instance, I got a robocall from the water department monday saying there is a boil advisory in effect due to high water and sediment runoff due to weather. Having enough people for the once in 10 years where ythey needed that many doesn't seem necessary. And once you get into intent sadly, all bets are off.
Since I and most everybody I know will never answer a call from a number not in their address book as a direct result of robocalls, I'm not sure that this is a huge issue.
If, for instance, my water company called me with such a notice, it's not likely I would actually hear about it that way, because I'd assume it was a robocall. I'd more likely hear about it through other media outlets.
I know several people with kids, and I have kids of my own. They're no longer young enough for this to matter, but even when they were, I still ignored calls. The main difference was that I actually bothered to listen to any voice mails unknown callers left.
I have never in my live received a robo call, then again I live in the EU. So yet another one of those unsolvable problems that have been solved elsewhere..
I live in a developed country and regularly get robocalls from other countries advising me that I need to urgently contact a bank/the tax department/the Chinese embassy so I don't get thrown in jail. I'm not sure how you can legislate your way out of this, and if you're not getting these in the EU yet, you will soon.
The USA has a huge population of English speakers. This makes robocalls more scalable. It doesn’t cost any more to call cellphones than landlines. Calling some EU country cellphones can cost 0.30 USD/min.
I always figured the most marginal of taxes would make it economically unviable.
If you charged a nickel to complete a call, the Water and Power Department can at worst, slip a $1 fee into a bill to build up a fund to pay for emergency outage calls. (Hopefully, they don't intend to call each customer more than 20 times per month).
But any industry based on spray-and-pray and miniscule take rates will find it too expensive to play.
The existence of the robocall plague already limits innovative applications of this tech.
But I think it wouldn't be hard to allow room for a service like you describe. You aren't likely to be making hundreds or thousands of such calls a day, after all.
If too many people hammer away at live support channels with automated tools, hold times will become very long and businesses will add captchas. Using automation on a synchronous communication channel implies that you think the recipient’s time is less valuable than your own.
I have a Twilio number that forwards to my real number, and the Twilio number is a contact in my address book. So anyone who gets the special Twilio number (eg, contractors, preschool, etc) can call from whatever number and never be blocked.
This only works if Twilio successfully blocks the spam calls before they are forwarded. I guess I’m not surprised that Twilio does a much better job of it than any of the dinosaur carriers.
Sure, but so far so good. The only "spam" call I get is people trying to get ahold of the previous owner of the phone number, but I find that far less annoying than marketing robo calls.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 97.5 ms ] threadIf you can’t pay a person to do it, it must not be important enough.
If, for instance, my water company called me with such a notice, it's not likely I would actually hear about it that way, because I'd assume it was a robocall. I'd more likely hear about it through other media outlets.
... my city (Austin) addresses this with paper inserts on the door
There are alternatives, presenting your options as the extent feels deliberately shortsighted
robocalls are never necessary
I never received a robocall in my life (and no spam calls at all after those where made illegal in the EU years ago).
Whereas in a developing country I had like 2-3 ad calls/wk and now I get none in EU.
If you charged a nickel to complete a call, the Water and Power Department can at worst, slip a $1 fee into a bill to build up a fund to pay for emergency outage calls. (Hopefully, they don't intend to call each customer more than 20 times per month).
But any industry based on spray-and-pray and miniscule take rates will find it too expensive to play.
Paying a bunch of school administrators to call several thousand homes is a waste of money.
many systems exist where you have to respond yes to acknowledge receipt. They can manually call the 1% that didn't respond.
Robocall technology isn't free either.
Seems like a lousy (lazy) solution to the problem that limits innovative applications of this tech.
But I think it wouldn't be hard to allow room for a service like you describe. You aren't likely to be making hundreds or thousands of such calls a day, after all.
I remember it being discussed when it was announced but I haven’t heard about it since.