120
peofro
3y

A while back, I had a lot of telemarketers were calling me daily, and I mean A LOT of them.

I got so frustrated with he calls that I decided I had to figure out a better way to handle those calls.

At the time, I was working with a PBX software called Asterisk, which is used to handle hardware interfaces and network applications for phone calls.

I needed a suitable side project and there was a version of Asterisk designed for Raspberry Pi, so I made a fun little answering service for myself.

Whenever a telemarketer called, I asked them to call back later, but to "my personal number", and gave them the number to my phone robot. (which had a pre-paid SIM card in a GSM dongle mounted)

When it received a call, it would play a pre-recorded phrase, wait for 1000 ms of silence and then play the next phrase.
After all 16 phrases had been played, it would start from phrase 7 again and repeat until the caller gave up.

I had this set up running for a while, and then added another robot for english speaking callers.

The calls stopped after a few months.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Comments
  • 24
    Sounds like fun, but make sure you don't say things like "yes" or "I agree" in the clips

    Wouldn't be the first time these callers spliced an audio track to fake a verbal contract
  • 27
    😂😂

    make this open source please.

    edit: would be interesting to listen to the resulting phone calls :P
  • 14
    There must have been a rare moment when spammers had to mark your call as spam
  • 21
    @nebula I did post the best calls on YT:
    https://youtube.com/channel/...

    Most of them are in Swedish, but there are some English ones too...
  • 6
    @peofro it's genius! i listened a couple and laughed hard
  • 6
    This is incredible.
    I listened to one of the english calls and your pre-recorded phrases were amazing.
    A nice idea with great implementation.
  • 7
    Had a friend who I lived with back in 2006, we devised a similar project. We didn't have Raspberry pi's back then so it was on a Dell PowerEdge server using additional Zaptel hardware. Hold music, the whole bit. Telemarketers and creditors alike hated our in-house "Phone System"...
  • 3
    This is brilliant
  • 2
    @LotsOfCaffeine In this case I would love to see them try. Because @peofro has the originals he can prove through audio analysis they committed fraud and can sue them and have all their verbal contracts void.
  • 1
    Awesome project mate! I need this for my multifunctional printer offers.
    Recording it definitely makes for some fun material. Reminds me of https://youtu.be/EzedMdx6QG4
  • 3
    This is genius!
  • 1
    @peofro do you have a list kit/software needed or source to read up on how
  • 3
    @dev-job-hunting
    Check this out:

    http://peo.nu/build-your-own-phone-...

    I wrote a quick English guide. I hope you'll find it useful :-)
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