Hacker News Reader

Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

For some reason I’ve been getting 12-20 spam calls per day (all for the same Medicaid/Medicare scam). I’m on T-Mobile which was one of the first carriers to roll out STIR/SHAKEN and I have their Scam Buster app installed and they are getting by all of that. It’s frustrating.

When I read about things like AudioPaLM, my first thought is of all the people in these call centers who seem to uniformly have pretty hard Indian accents and very American-sounding names (George Bush called me the other day!). Their days of working in a call center are numbered and their replacement is going to be a machine that is way cheaper to employ and better at the job.

View on HN

I'm more worried about the Philippines. Call center work is supporting the lower (younger) end of an educated bilingual middle-class there just as in India, but India has had more time to develop more options for those people than the Philippines has had.

The goal for business is to basically replace everyone with a computer, so I'd be worried about, everyone :)

But actually, what is interesting to think about is that the desire to learn English will likely start to diminish from this. If there is little gain to learning it, like, the computer will just take your job, would you still bother?

I mean some will remain interested, but many won't.

I live in Colombia and can testify that the demand to know English is enormous, and dwarfs the subset of demand for which call center work is responsible. Programming languages are documented in English. Scientific papers are written in English. Jobs in America require English. International travel outside of Latin America is much easier if you speak English. Etc.

I get those all day everyday. Fun to mess with them sometimes. I usually tell them my name is Ben Chode and my birthday is April 20, 1969

I just want there to be consequences for the abuse of the phone system and harassment that results. Nobody cares though.

The phone company will change your number if you want. The FCC will let you report these - one call at a time.

I actually thought about making an app to let me submit a report with a single click. If I started submitting 40-80 reports a week, would that get anybody’s attention? Would somebody at the FCC contact T-Mobile on my behalf and ask them to actually help me with this? Probably not.

Agreed. It basically makes my phone useless as a phone. I generally don't answer unrecognized calls unless I'm up for messing with a scammer, because that's who is usually calling. When I am expecting a phone call that's a problem because I sometimes don't recognize the number so don't answer. And my voicemail inbox is often just filled with this garbage.

Relevant: https://lennytroll.com/about.php (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frlde-PUrPA )

Earlier this week I got spam call that was almost certainly an AI-generated human voice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com