AI, Pick Up The Phone

You've likely encountered numerous occasions on which you've had to convince your bank or other service provider to let you talk to a human. Pressing "0" twice, or insisting on saying "Representative" with escalating volume and irritation appears to do the trick.

At the same time, you're getting an increasing number of spam sales calls from robots, often using phone numbers that look subtly like your own -- an effort to get past some visual barrier that will make you pick up.

My Android phone does flag certain phone #s as spam, but as often it is I who wind up flagging the number as such, after having taken the call.

In this new proposed system, to be turned on at the phone owner's prerogative, the phone's AI (i.e. Siri, Google, Alexa, etc) actually picks up the call silently, and performs the reverse Turing test on the caller -- at the very least, determining if the caller is human.

It then has an option of taking a voicemail or waking the phone up to actually allow the call to you to proceed.

A modern version of screening the call using an answering machine.