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Last year I built an automated call screener using Google’s cloud speech APIs.

Extremely effective, runs headless on a $5 VPS box by proxying calls through VoIP, but the added latency is a bit of a no-go.

Depends if you’re on iOS or Android. iOS really only supports blacklisting with the exception of Do Not Disturb contact/favorite whitelisting.

Thanks! I think Google Voice has two lines in, so it’d return a busy tone when I’m in an active call with someone (one line for each person to do the call merging).

>Would it possible to package all this in mobile app instead?

Unfortunately the limiting factor would be background processing here; iOS isn’t permissive enough to really replace the server. I think it might be possible by using a background service on Android though.

Good question! I set my prompt to verify that they at least know my first or last name, so it’s pretty good at reducing false positives. For calls that do get filtered, I keep the recorded audio snippets used for keyword extraction (originally used for debugging). If I had more time, I’d implement sending a muted/non-ringing push notification whenever a call gets filtered with an option to play back the recorded audio snippets from that session.

I had the same problem a few months ago before I set up an automated virtual assistant to pre-screen calls[1]. It works with my existing phone number by forwarding all inbound calls to a small Linode box which plays an audio prompt and listens for specific keywords. (Whitelisted numbers get patched through immediately.)

Since I made that post, the system has filtered 100% of the spammers and 0% of my actual contacts. I think the non-bot spammers started to get sick of hearing my audio prompt because the number of spam calls that come in has dropped dramatically.

[1] https://andrewchidden.com/defeating-spam-callers-with-speech...