While not exactly the same, I once got a call from a number I didn't recognize, and when I answered the phone it was a recording of my wife saying "Hello?". I no longer answer phone calls by saying "Hello", unless I know the caller.
I have a system that takes it one step further and both reduces the awkwardness and false-positive rate at the same time: I add the people that I know to the contacts on my phone. When a call comes in as a number instead of a name, I simply decline to pick it up. If it's not a spam call, they will either leave a voice message or send a text. If they do neither, then either it was a spam/scam call, or whatever they had to say probably wasn't that important in the first place. Win/win.
I've been doing this for a little over a decade and it hasn't let me down yet.
It's let me down a ton. Deliveries, contractors, maintenance people, doctor's offices with a last minute appointment available, and so forth. Fortunately never for a true emergency, but that's also something to keep in mind as well.
There are lots of things that people simply don't leave a voice mail or text because if they can't contact you immediately, there's no point. Or if the contractor can't get you on the phone, they'll just move onto the next home and skip work on yours that day or that whole week.
my strategy is to live in a different place than my area code and only pick up from number that do not share my area code. This is pretty clise to working but I did almost miss an instacart delivery because they happened to be from my home town.
> my strategy is to live in a different place than my area code and only pick up from number that do not share my area code. This is pretty clise to working but I did almost miss an instacart delivery because they happened to be from my home town.
I'm in that situation, and it works most but not all of the time.
I don't really keep track, but I'm pretty sure I've gotten robocalls with an area code appropriate to my city, either it was coincidence or they were using a database that had my actual location.
A good tactic I use is as stated + if you see a number you don't recognize is to answer and then put yourself on mute and wait. Typically robocalls just hang up after a few seconds of silence.
Call centers will dial multiple numbers and connect to only the ones where someone responds. Sometimes they will still hang up on you because multiple calls responded.
I leave a simple voicemail message: please send me a text.
People that listen to that will... send a text.
It is sad that virtually every form of communication: snail mail, phone, email is overridden with spam and fraud, and the "FCC" does jack about it except a CYA "hey we said it was wrong".
The FCC has been so thoroughly lost to regulatory capture and licentious industry - lobbying - official revolving door that it possibly the least effective federal regulatory agency, and that is saying something
I don't think my doctor's office can even send texts. They just have landlines.
Same with restaurants calling about a reservation opening up. Etc.
Not to mention the fact that if someone doesn't intend to leave a voicemail, they'll often/usually hang up as soon as the prerecorded message starts. "Hi, you've reached" -- <click>.
Those sound like cases where you would have heightened expectation of an important anonymous call. If that's not the case, and you must always maintain a high expectation of an important anonymous call, then I don't know what you can do. I guess that's how the telephone was, say, 70 years ago.
This worked for us until we owned a house. Now, we get calls from random numbers multiple times a week, and if we don't answer, the house falls down or something.
For deliveries, if they have tracking (which most of them has) I'm expecting an unknown number, so when I pick up 99% of the time it's the delivery person.
For the rest, unless its an appointment that requires me picking up the phone ASAP (which is maybe once or twice a year for me), they leave a message and I just call back.
In France, we have a gouv service to block non-solicited phone commercial calls. It works pretty well. Combined with the default google spam blocker, most of the phone calls I receive are phone calls I want.
You’re correct. One suggestion is explicitly request email or text instead of calling. (Or WhatsApp in many countries.) Since some people are hearing-impaired, it’s not even an unusual request even before this spam program arose.
It won’t always work, e.g. the request won’t reach the delivery driver who’s a contractor of the subcontractor of the logistics company you mention this to. However, I’ve found it works with businesses that are small enough to care about customer satisfaction.
This is a specific example of what should be a much more general practice: having separate protocols for establishing an initial contact and establishing a communications session with an already existing contact. My email spam filter is based on this. It does a first-stage separation between email from people I've corresponded with in the past and everything else. That simple heuristic is enough to achieve >99% accuracy all by itself.
Stepping back a bit, I find it kind of strange that knowledge of a 7-digit number is all that's required for anyone in the world to (by default) immediately interrupt someone.
Here's a thought. If the concept of a phone was never invented, and nobody knew what one was, and then suddenly here in 2024, an app company invented an app where:
- The user could type in a N digit number and hit a button...
- This would cause another user's device to instantly stop doing what it was doing. ring and buzz with a modal popup window...
- With no authentication whatsoever or often even no identification...
- And then if that other user pushed a button, it allowed the initial user to be able to instantly start sending them voice
This thing would never make it past any app store's guidelines, and would likely be unacceptable to users. It's intrusive, invasive, and practically invites abuse and spam. Yet, since The Phone is an actual historic invention that goes back decades, it's culturally acceptable for I guess legacy reasons.
In the prehistoric era (and continuing into the present day), all that's required to interrupt someone is a set of vocal chords you can use to talk to them, or a finger you can use to tap them on the shoulder, or a fist you can use to knock on their door. The universe isn't naturally shaped in a way that makes interrupting difficult, and never has been.
I'm pretty sure that if the phone system didn't exist, no one from a call center in South Asia would have ever come all the way to rural Canada to try to tell me I have a computer virus that they can fix for a few hundred dollars.
What common physical space keeps people from interrupting you?
- I had my own room as a kid. My parents and brother banged on the door whenever they pleased.
- I worked at a tech company, had my own desk, and wore headphones. Coworkers still sent me Slack messages and tapped me on my shoulder.
- I've lived in a home in the burbs. People came to my home and rang the bell.
None of them were hard for the interruptor to do, and all of them happened frequently. In fact, I would argue that they are more frequent than the number of phone calls I get nowadays, which are actually easy much easier to screen/ignore than any of the above interruptions.
I think their point is in physical space, dozens to maybe thousands of people (if there's a lot of people around you, I guess?) can easily interrupt you at any given moment. With phones and things like Slack, hypothetically anyone near a phone can interrupt you if you're near your phone. Which people usually keep near them.
I would say depending on how bad someone has it they could get 1 to 3 spam calls a day, I assume if someone was getting consistently more than that they'd use a screener to lower it. That's a significant amount.
In all of the places named above, people have interrupted me more than once a day, and I don't think that's abnormal. And again, it's much easier and less rude to put my phone on silent for unknown numbers, than it is to ignore a coworker/friend/neighbor/partner/child who's trying to get my attention, or even a stranger at my door.
I'm not here defending spam calls. They are annoying AF.
Nor do I disagree that hypothetically more people on Earth have access to us than ever before. Of course they do.
Nor do I find being interrupted pleasant. I personally find it very annoying, even when it's a loved one.
I'm just making the point that this idea of world where people weren't easy to interrupt never existed.
All of the same people who could interrupt you before still can, in all the same ways. In addition, people can call you and interrupt you that way, too.
I am not saying people couldn’t interrupt before, there are simply more ways for more people to interrupt you than ever before.
On the contrary, due to devices like phones and the internet, I have a smaller number of interruptive people in my immediate vicinity than I probably would have decades or centuries ago. Friends and loved ones feel more comfortable moving away, it's become more of a norm, bc it's easier than ever to keep in touch over long distances, and so they don't knock on my door, because they don't even live in my city. And on the flip side, I find myself surrounded by lots of strangers who don't know me, and so don't knock on my door or stop me on the street either.
I'm trying to change this, however, and make a lot more local friends. Despite the higher potential for being interrupted.
so I always thought that but weirdly a bunch of countries are just on the US exchange system. It's still billed as an international call but for example Bermuda is just 441. The American in me chuckles a bit at the idea of the UK's monarchs needing to dial 1 first to call their own territory
Though according to The Crown, they are constantly jabbering on the phone. After some designated member of staff dials it with a dialing glove, no doubt.
I navel-gaze that if we redesigned communications from the ground up we could handle this better. When you greet someone physically you can add each other as known trusted contacts immediately. And when you sign up to some service online and have to put in your contact info, which likewise prompts you to add them as contact. And you can't share along a contact you know to someone else without that contact ID uniquely identifying you.
That way, everyone who should contact you can do so and if someone else gets their hand on your contact info you can figure out who leaked it.
I do this with my email. I have a bunch of different emails under my own domain, and I use info+uniqueidentifier@domain.org for registrations which do not warrant their own actual email handle.
This way, I can easily filter incoming email, and I can see where an email came from if any party sells my data.
This also works with GMail by the way, you can use youraccount+anyrandomstring@gmail.com and emails will still be delivered to you.
I use a separate email handle that I only hand out to actual human beings, never to companies and never use for account registrations.
This has worked really well for the past 15 years or so.
iCloud’s Hide My Email is perfect for this. No “+” convention, it just generates a random @icloud.com email address specifically for whatever website/app you’re signing up for, and forwards it to your real email. The random addresses are indistinguishable from real iCloud.com email addresses, there’s no naming convention a website can reject.
I never worry about sites that require signups any more, I just autogenerate an email for them and use a fake name. I couldn’t give a shit less if they get hacked or leak data, because the email and password are randomly generated. If they turn out to spam me I just disable that email address and never hear from them again.
The only people who have my “real” email addresses are people I know personally.
> The random addresses are indistinguishable from real iCloud.com email addresses, there’s no naming convention a website can reject.
That's not remotely true.
The very very very vast majority of actual iCloud email addresses are going to have "dictionary" names. It's quite trivial to detect a randomized address (and at that point, you probably don't even care about a couple of false positives).
Multiple instances of letter-number-letter-number ("b2y4r")? Coupled with letter combinations that don't exist in most languages ("ytbn")? And no dictionary words ("john", "smith", "booklover")? Random address.
Now, whether you care to do business with someone who detects this is a different question altogether.
The auto-generated addresses also have dictionary names. They’re explicitly designed to look like addresses that a real person might come up with… typically a dictionary word, followed by some numbers and symbols. Just like other email addresses on popular services where all the good names are taken.
You’re thinking about something else. There’s a thing called “Sign In With Apple” that is available when an app/website wants to offer it, that integrates with Apple’s authentication system. The email the app/website sees is a bunch of random characters followed by @privaterelay.appleid.com. But Sign In With Apple is not the same as Hide My Email. SIWA is for when the website opts into Apple as an auth provider.
I just looked at my alias list in iCloud and every single “hide my email” alias looks like a plausible @icloud.com address with dictionary words, and every “sign in with Apple” address is using the privaterelay address with the super random characters. There are no addresses that look like a987dfc429be@icloud.com.
I heard about the +, but don't some sites reject it? Or can't bad actors just strip it? You'd need your own domain with a large amount of unique identifiers for it to work if it became popular.
I find it quite rare for systems to reject the + these days. One notable exception is my credit union, whose Web 1.0 system turned it into a space. The most annoying thing about this practice is if you're telling it to a human, they are very confused about your email address having their company's name in it. I occasionally get "do you work here or something?" Every once in a while I'm talking to someone (example: elementary school secretary) who gives me a vibe that they're going to be really thrown off by this and I just make up a three letter unique code for a suffix since I can still search for whoever sent me that first to see what the suffix means.
On the stripping of the + and suffix, yeah, bad actors who recognize your scheme can do that, but spamming is about quantity, not quality, so they just aren't going to put in the effort.
Spamming is about quantity but stripping a "+" is something a one line script can do, which is what will happen if this gets popular. A real solution should be more resilient. Like spam binning anything that does not use the "+" ?
Well, I've always thought it would be fairly easy to strip, but I've now been doing it for 25 years and it's obvious the spammers aren't going to go to even that small effort. I once heard the CEO of wordpress say that it would be easy for them to go after adblockers too, but they explicitly didn't because the userbase that went to the trouble of installing adblockers didn't tend to be a lucrative advertising demographic anyway. It's all about return on your investment.
unfortunately, i disagree; i stopped using plus sign addressing because so many sites i wanted to use it on (many of them for important things like medical stuff) wouldn't accept it
I still miss qmail's convention, which used a - instead. That worked flawlessly everywhere, circa early 2000s.
(I still have some email handling rules for my domain that understand the - aliases I created.)
I think that both conventions are flawed, as adversaries that know the convention can just remove the distinguishing part. If someone signs up with the email address real+spam@example.com, then they're just going to spam real@example.com. Apple's thing where it creates a987dfc429be@icloud.com is much better. Maybe that's the username I selected. Maybe it's an anti-spam forwarding address. There is no way of knowing. (Actually, I think it does something like relay.icloud.com? So yeah, they know it's not your real address. Apple just says "if you reject this, you can't have an iPhone app", which is what makes it work.)
Following my navel gazing idea, the trick is that mail to real@example.com just gets spam binned automatically. Anyone who has any business emailing your should have an real+randomuniqueid@example.com email address to send to you. It's almost like the randomuniqueid is a password to your inbox.
Unfortunately, this is only for email no such thing for phones or anything.
A certain tongue-in-cheek email provider [0] uses . (a dot) for this purpose, i.e. username.anything@domain.tld. Spammers could remove the distinguishing part here too, but they can't be bothered to keep a list of all the conventions used by different providers, so I think it should work pretty well.
(Personally I use a dedicated catch-all domain now, and the username is the distinguishing part – try to remove that!)
Not all mail servers treat a+b@a.com and a@a.com as the same email.
By equal token, you can't be sure that the email address doesn't actually just contain a plus sign.
I was disappointed to find out at work recently that the plus convention was not configured. It made testing account signups more difficult. This is when I dug in a bit and found it that it depends in the mail server for whether those are unique addresses or not.
> Apple's thing where it creates a987dfc429be@icloud.com
Still trivial to detect. Random letter/number combinations, letter combinations that don't exist in the dictionary, no dictionary word? Pretty detectable.
Apple has this as a service now. It's more automatic than the GMail process and works well.
A weakness with the GMail process is that spammers are able to remove the + part (even if most don't), and your credentials or identity can be aligned across leaked credential databases by removing the + part.
If they were really smart, they'd parse and use that info to their advantage. Have info+autozone@domain.com? Send company-specific phishing emails to +apple, +wellsfargo, +$POPULAR_COMPANY every other week
I've though a little bit about what a good successor to email would look like, and in addition to things like native support for encryption and authentication, one of the big features I wanted was to put not allow sending a message unless the recipient had added you to their list of contacts. And maybe have a way to to send a request that someone add you to their contacts, that would be processed differently than a normal message.
That's my approach as well, but I had the same number calling me for 3 weeks and I finally answered. It was my electric company, something had gone wrong with a payment.
They have my email address, they send me txts all the time, but apparently collections is still making phone calls. Had to be the dumbest thing I'd seen. Once I answered and found out the issue, I paid the bill properly, but I wonder how far it would have gone before they cut off my power, while they kept sending me emails and txts about things that have nothing to do with my bill.
For some places their internal processes require positive contact with the account holder, in other words they can't trust that an email or text will be read (or read by the account holder). They definitely should've tried at least once though, especially if you opted for that as your primary communication method.
I mean: I think it is perfectly OK to have a policy that requires real people to make real phone calls for some things -- especially things that might not fit into automated systems.
But I think it's very bizarre that these real people would not also leave a voicemail message stating the purpose of the call.
(There's tons of reasons for people to not answer the phone that extend beyond screening unknown numbers.
Like: I might be happy to answer the phone for a strange number but I'm crawling around under my car and my hands are covered in greasy road funk. Or I'm with a client. Or I'm at work and my boss is an overbearing prick. Or...)
I've had a disturbingly large number of repeat calls from people who absolutely refuse to leave a message. And it's always some recruiter who saw an opening on indeed or somewhere and thinks the resume I updated 5 years ago is a good match.
The problem is that if I'm getting repeated calls from an unrecognized number, I'm assuming my wife, my kids, or my parents are in an ambulance, so I have to drop everything and answer.
As a rule of thumb, if I get a one-off call that doesn't leave a message, I'll search my email inbox for that number, as they've probably contacted me separately. However, one time, I got called 5 times in 90 minutes, with the only message being 23 seconds of silence, and an email I hadn't even read yet (searching the number brought up the email). I sent an angry email that amounted to "you have told me how you AND YOUR CLIENTS treat prospective employees' time. I will never apply to any job you suggest, even independently of you. Stop calling"
Many of us are in situations where we get calls from various people we haven't had contact before (nurse at the child's school, parent's doctor, there's a lot of them) that should be answered immediately; waiting until later to listen to the message could have significant impacts. Some of the calls (injured child) could require immediate contact and, if not answered, could result in other issues.
My area code doesn't match my area, and most e.g. recruiters are calling from other area codes as well, so I can be reasonably confident that a local-area-code call is legitimate, but man is it frustrating to brace myself for "$child/$spouse/$etc is on their way to $hospital..." and instead I get "I was very impressed by your skills I got from $someJobBoardIHaven'tUsedInYears, are you free to talk about a $industryOrCareerFieldIDon'tWorkIn position located in $areaIHaven'tLivedInInYears?"* Especially if they've called repeatedly in a short amount of time without leaving a message.
*bonus if they're speaking heavily accented english and miss important connecting words, suggesting they don't even really understand the script they're reading from, much less the job description they just pulled off of Indeed or wherever.
Yeah, when you have small children, your obligation to pick up the phone when they aren't with you is increased. I also find that whenever you're shopping for big-ticket items that involve salespeople and soliciting multiple bids, you have to forego your "don't pick up the phone for unknown numbers" policy.
I now just pick up and say "hello?" and count off two seconds. If I don't hear a response within that time I hang up. I've had a couple false positives, but they generally just assume there was a dropped call and try again.
I pick up and don't say anything. Humans typically, after about 4 seconds, go "umm.. hello?" and I have a conversation with them, while bots simply hang up.
Same, except I am expecting calls from unknown numbers more or less constantly these days. I do remember a time in my life where I could get away with an attitude of "people I care about have other ways to contact me, so this is a non-problem," but that was basically before marriage, kids, and homeownership.
One way might be to list a number that you monitor as their "emergency contact" but list a virtual or other no-pick-up-policy number for all other forms.
The only issue is that a friend once listed me as their emergency contact for a gym membership, but then the gym made telemarketing calls to me with it. There should be federal law protecting emergency contact numbers from being shared or used for any reason except an emergency.
Alternative method might be to set up a Twilio workflow that says "Press 1 to reach me" and only forward to your actual phone after that. That will probably eliminate all the robocallers but not the human telemarketers
I have children. And I didn't say I wait until later to listen to the message.
I can't think of any non-action-movie scenarios where me picking up the phone within a specific 120 second window would be a life-or-death situation. If there are any, they are so unlikely that they are not even remotely worth being annoyed by multiple scam calls a day.
This 100%. iPhones have a feature to do this automatically. It doesn’t even ring, and goes straight to voicemail if they’re not in your contacts. It’s so freeing!
I was waiting by the door for an Amazon package recently that was out for delivery and I got a phone call from an unknown number. I answered it and the guy said "Hi, I'm calling from Amazon delivery." and they almost had me. He then said some bullshit about needing me to log into some random URL and a laughed and hung up on him.
That's relatively uncommon in the US, except for food and other perishables. Although often they text. But the people I know who order food and silence their phone normally are glued to the tracking page in the app anyway.
I have cameras and and a smart doorbell so I know if someone is at the door. This plus in-app notifications handles food delivery for me.
You can also set up a shortcut to toggle the setting. There’s been a couple times when waiting for a callback where I turn the setting off. Then when I get the call I switch it back.
Ultimately, for me, the pros far outweigh the cons. But you have to make the decision for yourself.
One major flaw in this, at least for me: Dr's offices. They love to dial from a gazillion random numbers, and for privacy reasons they often leave no message or a very vague and concerning "Call us when you get this" sort of thing.
Ugh, and then you call the number and it takes you to an IVR menu where the only options are “billing” and “surgery” or other some such. I’ve had doctors call me with results and the only way I could get ahold of them was to call, pretend I had a billing issue to get to some human, then try to convince them to connect me to the person who just called me not 5 minutes ago.
I have a different system. I pick up the phone, listen to them for a bit, tell them "please wait while I get my credit card number", and then I just walk away with the connection still open.
It's great when it works, but when my mom was in the hospital and they needed to reach me, I got burned by this big time and don't do it anymore. It's too easy to miss a call that could literally be life and death (my mom is better now).
And the entire "Hang up, look up, call back" is just a trapdoor firewall. From a 10,000-foot perspective, humans and computers are the same, they're just nodes that communicate information.
Man I think about this all the time. We have robots calling humans and robots answering calls to verify the other end isn't a robot. We just need to connect the dots and have the robots talk to the robots and collate the important bits for the humans. English becomes a fuzzy "API" for the robots to communicate with each other. I get weirded out when I think about it.
I do exactly this but take it even one step further. My actual (primary) phone number is only ever given out to humans. I have a second Google Voice phone number that I give out to machines (e.g. online shopping that "requires" a phone number that will eventually be leaked).
This is why I use a numeric pager, digits handed out to both machines and humans.
I call back from an unlisted number. Few people have my actual phone #.
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If people are persistant, I usually mention something to the effect of "you don't want my phone number in your device, I know some weird people."
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The first time I used Venmo, was also my last — the "feature" which show you every person who has your phone number in their phonebook was a bit too weird [the idea of public payments also strange].
I have a child, he has a phone but his battery might go empty, or the phone is lost or broken, he has my number written down and I instruct him to call me from a colleague or a stranger. Maybe my case is special since my son has some health issues so I really want to know immediately if something happened.
This kind of problem needs to be solved at the root cause, say if the phone companies could be made to pay a bit when you get spammed and forced to recover their costs from the spammers the issue would be solved, now if they profit the issue will get larger and alrger.
This is adding more complexity. The solution is super simple, you should be able to report the number as spam, if a few other people report the number then the phone company will block the number and the phone company will have to pay the customers affected a small sum. You will immediately see the phone companies putting the work for detecting mass spammers, making sure that businesses that do mass calls have deposits for the case they abuse the system etc.
This method unfortunately falls apart if you get a phone call from a hospital. They'll leave you a voice message, but when you call the same number back you'll get the front desk instead of the doctor who left you the message. They'll patch you through to the ward your Dad's in, but they won't be able to give out any information over the phone, so you'll need to wait for the doctor to call you back. They're out doing their rounds at the moment, but they'll get back to you as soon as they can.
Yup, same. I'll make an exception if I'm expecting an important call but aren't sure of what number it's going to come from. This is rare enough that it doesn't bother me much. And now that some calls are SHAKEN/STIR-verified, with a caller ID, I can often have good confidence before I pick up that it's actually the call I'm waiting for.
I do this too, but I also remember that I'm doing this from a situation of privilege, where I mostly don't have to wait for calls that could be life changing (ex: old-school HR calling back for a new job).
On Pixel phones (or was it Google Fi? can't remember), this is automatic. If it's not someone in my contact list already, known spam gets auto blocked and everyone else gets redirects to the voice assistant that takes a message and transcribes it. Cuts down on spam like 99% for me.
I had an iPhone for a few months and the spam was so bad, even with the third party spam blockers. I switched back to Android shortly after.
I do the same thing usually. If I do pick up an unknown number because I am expecting something, I usually press speaker and mute and just wait. If it's a person, I'll get an awkward Hello? And if it's an auto dialer usually I get nothing or the waterdrop beep and drop either way.
I do a thing where I answer and just dont say anything (ensuring my enviornment is silent) for like 20+ seconds.... they hang up and I block number. (The bot thinks its a dead num and I dont get calls again.
This is also why you always call anyone you don’t know back on a listed number like the switchboard of the company they claim to be from if you think you need to engage with them
I've a somewhat uncommon area code (less than a million 307 numbers), so any time I get a call from a 307 number, I'm reasonably confident that its either a wrong number, or a spoofed number. In either case, I don't answer. Its quite a system.
I've always wished that there was an option to whitelist certain area codes. I've had the same number for 20 years, and now live in a different part of the country. I get very little spam from local area codes -- but a ton spoofing my phone number's area code. Sending all calls all those calls to voicemail while continuing to ring for local would be the right balance (kids' school, doctors office, etc...).
If your car gets stolen, and the police find it, they will call you from a phone number that's not in your contacts. If you don't pick up, you won't realize that your stolen car has been recovered a couple miles from your house, and if you show up there in 30 minutes you can drive it back home, but if you don't, the police will send it to a towing yard, which will require you to go through 24 hours of paperwork with the police to obtain a release and then pay the towing yard $1,000+ to tow and store your car.
If you live in an area of low crime, though, maybe it'll be fine not to answer phone calls from numbers that aren't in your phone.
Medical calls are another, strangers finding your lost stuff is a third. I'm probably forgetting more.
Biggest reason - voicemail. Most numbers have a mailbox limit, it's somewhat common to reach a number that has a full mailbox. Sure, you should be emptying your mailbox, but this still means you can easily drop calls if you haven't checked it in a while.
I answer every call. no matter what the caller ID. I'm a landlord I have hundreds of rentals. I get calls from police and detectives from blocked numbers sometimes from people that are frantically complaining about something that's very serious and requires my immediate attention to call police or to respond immediately.... I've had situations involving death where you know not answering the phone is not an option at least for me.
How long does it take to listen to a voicemail and call them back? A one or two minute delay is almost never going to cause an issue.
Even in the highest crime areas the ratio of spam calls to legit and urgent calls is going to be thousands to one. You can cumulatively save a lot of time and annoyance by not answering all of those spam calls. I'm actually surprised to see this debated, I also stopped answering unknown numbers years ago and thought that was standard at this point.
I do not pick up the phone unless the caller is in my contact list. No exception (my phone does not even ring).
All other calls are routed to voice-mail and near-instantly transcribed. The message then shows up on my desktop and on my mobile phone. I can read it and respond to it as necessary.
Not sure about the person you're replying to, but my Pixel 6 has automatic voicemail transcription.
I thought there used to be an option to automatically send a copy to email, but I'm not seeing it now. Could probably use Tasker or any notification sync service to send it to your desktop.
If my car got stolen the last thing in the world I would do it take it back immediately.
Who knows what damage has been done to the clutch, or the engine internals while it was bouncing off the rev limiter for minutes at a time. Also I'll bet there is a lot less rubber on the tires than before, and probably all kinds of nasty stuff on the inside.
Heck no I'm not taking it back. That's insurance all day long.
Well, this is a pretty niche question, but 谁啊 and 谁呀 are pretty much indistinguishable. Do you know how Chinese people tend to write it? In my mind it's 谁啊.
谁啊 could be said by anyone, 谁呀 is the just the cute inflected 谁啊。My 7 year old over uses 呀 I think because of the kid shows he watched when he was younger.
I tried putting сука блят into Google translate. сука бля translated as "fucking bitch", but pasting in the final т changed the translation to "dry pancakes". Could you shed some light on this?
My Russian isn't very fluent, but I do know that "блин!" (pancake, bliny if you are familiar with Russian food) is used as an interjection that's less offensive than блядь. Kind of like saying darn instead of damn, or shoot instead of shit. Perhaps Google Translate was mixing those up.
Edit: And perhaps it's assuming your k is a kh and that you want суха instead of suka.
It's сука блять, you're missing ь, which isn't a "real" (phonetic) letter, more of a "modifier" indicating how to pronounce the letter before.
It really doesn't translate properly, but I'd say "fucking shit" is more in spirit than "fucking bitch". It's not an insult targeting someone directly, more of a sign of frustration.
blin means pancake and is used as a similar sounding replacement for blyat (eg. say blin instead of blyat when something goes wrong)
I can't reproduce your results on google translate but I noticed odd translations which don't make any sense at times. I guess it comes from crowdsourcing results and people purposefully providing wrong translations for comedic effect.
Precisely, I give zero information. If I do pick up once in a blue moon, I pause for 3-5 seconds to give a chance for the human to start (if it isn't a bot).
I have a Pixel phone and a Google bot can answer the phone for me. It transcribes the conversations on my phone in real-time, and I can push a few buttons to tell to bot what to say--things like "tell me more", or "please tell me why you're calling".
If the entity calling gives an explanation I care about, then I can press a button and the bot says "thanks, connecting you now" and then I can say "hello" with my own voice and have a normal conversation. I think most people think it's just a fancy answering machine, they don't realize I'm controlling it.
Voice calls are on the decline anyway, but I think it's becoming possible to have a very sophisticated AI secretary answer calls for you, even beyond what I've explained Google is doing. Imagine being able to give your LLM phone secretary a prompt and it would answer calls for you. You could tell it something like "the snowblower I listed in the classifieds is already sold" and maybe it could automatically resolve some calls or text messages for you.
I have the same phone and feature. My experience is that everyone always hangs up immediately after facing the screener. I'd love to actually use this feature, I mean hell, I can fucking text responses to them and read what they say through it! But I never can in a realistic setting because people hear robot and hang up. I've been eagerly waiting Apple's release so that the feature becomes more well known. Google really dropped the ball on advertising and honestly I think should have just pushed it to all Android phones because you need to change how people interact. I've worried it would go away because Google deems it "useless" despite its uselessness being that the feature is just not known. There's just too few Pixel phones so people aren't experiencing the screener and so act like a normal human being and go "robot? Ugh, fuck that" and associate this with calling a 1 800 number.
Yeah, most people hang up immediately, mission accomplished probably. Sometimes the doctors office calls and awkwardly starts leaving a full fledged message rather than just saying their name (like the bot tells them to), then, when I press the answer button the bot interrupts them and we start a normal phone call.
In fairness, it may be awkward, but it doesn't waste the caller's time, none of the robot messages are long, and people are quickly able to say their name and why they're calling.
My experience is more them just hanging up. Including the doctor's office. A funny case was my friend used me as a reference for a security clearance. They called, skipped to voicemail, I immediately call back to find a busy line, I leave a message, then I get a call back the next day from a new number in which I now need to just answer any unknown number. That's also happened with doctors and other offices, so it completely undermines the feature for me. Yeah, it helps with robocallers, but the DNC list does a better job. The feature has a ton of potential though, I just think it is useless if it doesn't enter the public lexicon.
I've never had the experience you've had where they start to leave a message. Maybe because I don't live in The Bay? Idk. They either just hang up or go to voicemail. Which always results in the game of phone tag. So not only was mission __not__ accomplished, but the mission difficulty increased.
I wonder what attenuation is applied to the security clearance system, if it is only reaching the sort of maniac (jk. Kinda.) who manually answers their calls, haha.
> My experience is that everyone always hangs up immediately after facing the screener.
Working as intended!
This isn't a new process, answering machines and operators have been around for ages. If your information is important, leave a message. If you're unwilling to leave a message, text. If you're unwilling to leave a message or text, it wasn't important.
But sometimes the person calling you is calling 300 people for something not important to him, but super important to you. Like power utility payments. If he can't reach you, and decides to leave no message, he himself personally is not much inconvenienced, but your account affects you.
My experience with Call Screen is actually very positive. It screens tons of spam calls and legitimate people who are actually calling for me do talk to my robot assistant, I get a quick transcription, and I pick up. It's why I can't quit Google's Pixels.
Maybe it's regional, I'm in the Bay Area, and people are used to it here by now.
You'd think that, but tell that to my university who says "call us as soon as you get this message" and nothing else. You're right in that it never is really that important, but that's true in the same sense that most calls aren't important. Either way, I don't end up knowing but if I responded I'd spend less time dealing with whatever it is. (Good god, can people just leave proper fucking messages? Say why you called! And don't get me started with texts or slack messages that are like "hey" or "we need to talk" and nothing else... types "hey" in slack. Asked what they want. Refuses to elaborate. Asks to huddle. Wants to know if there are cookies in the break room)
> I think most people think it's just a fancy answering machine, they don't realize I'm controlling it.
FWIW, I'm betting it is just a fancy answering machine for most people. I use this feature (couldn't live without it), but I've never once been in-the-loop. My phone acts autonomously! I checked the logs for a few months, but I don't even bother anymore. It's never had a false positive.
Ditto, it really should be the standard. Well, as well as the government actually enforcing these laws strictly. I am pretty sure they could compel companies to maintain and filter out spam/robo calls. Especially if it costs them $$$$$
The phone system has gotten so bad these days that a lot of the time the pausing for 3-5 seconds isn’t voluntary - it just doesn’t connect the call properly. The most basic hundred year old regular phone call is too much to handle for modern systems I suppose
same, but now a lot of callers whom i would like to speak with -- e.g. my insurance company -- just hang up before greeting me (because they think my phone's broken?). but then if i screen everyone via voicemail instead, a different (but overlapping) portion of callers refuse to leave messages. it's like everyone's given up on using the POTS outside of their immediate social circle, and the few people/businesses who still do are either malicious, or are just going through the motions.
thanks spammers. and thanks FCC for sitting idly over the decades and letting the spammers ruin it. weird time to finally put your foot down, but sure, okay.
I've been getting these calls where nobody says anything for like 3 minutes then someone says Hello. My paranoid mind thinks they are trying to record my voice to use AI to impersonate me.
> My paranoid mind thinks they are trying to record my voice to use AI to impersonate me.
You're not paranoid, banks, the Minnesota Attorney General and the FCC have been warning about scammers recording even as simple as a "yes" to use in their scams [1][2][3], although actual evidence has been scarce to say the least [4].
I've got this call regarding energy prices in Poland (worth mention, it happen AFTER maximum prices threshold was frozen by govt). A pre-recorded "lady" persistently tries to force me to say "yes" going with "something interrupted us, can you hear me?" over seven times.
Search results point for this number as being related to PV panels scam.
My thought has been that they're listening for background sounds to try to beef up the advertising profile they have on me. Maybe there is some super sketchy ad-tech company putting beacons that emit a QR-like UUID audio signature in the frequencies near the top and bottom of the range that gets transmitted by cell phones, and ringing you up from a robo-dialer and listening for the beacons tells them where you are.
FWIW, I get these, too. All unknown numbers go straight to voicemail, which auto-transcribes, so I just see "Hello... hello..." in the transcription and hit delete. No idea what it's about.
I got a call sort of like that, it was bizarre. A person claiming to be a Comcast rep called, introduced themselves, asked if I was me, and then immediately hung up as soon as I made a noise.
It is possible they just hung up because I was already a little skeptical and feeling cagey, so didn’t give an enthusiastic “yeah that’s me.”
Anyway, I’ve never been called for something that benefits me. So, hopefully every company that depends on cold-calling will go out of business soon as everyone younger than, like, halfway through gen X doesn’t pick up their phone anymore.
Sorry for the breach of phone etiquette but I am on the same page here - the caller needs to speak first so I can tell whether they're a real person or not. If it's an automated system I'm happy to remain silent in the hope that they don't realize my phone number isn't another automated system.
I guess you'll end up confusing a lot of people since it's exactly backwards from the normal handshake.
Although you're not alone, most of the time when I call customer support and it's an overseas call center, I have to say Hello 2-3 times before the person on the other end acknowledges my existence. I guess they don't realize that I can hear all of their background noise before they talk.
If they end up hanging up and texting me out of confusion then that's the best outcome I could've asked for... otherwise the call is either from a receptionist (who generally speak first anyways) or a relative that has learned of my vocal recalcitrance.
Maybe if I just placed a delivery order I will answer for an unknown local number. Beyond that, leave a message at the beep and maybe I'll check it in a few days.
When you’re dealing with contractors and whatever for house stuff, yeah you kinda need to answer the phone for long stretches of time. Same if you have kids (I don’t), you need to be receptive. Yes yes I am incredibly aware that people can leave voicemails and send text messages, but many out there won’t do it, from real experience, especially those outside of the tech bubble.
I have a friend who would always answer the phone with a robotic monotone "READY" like a C64 BASIC prompt. It made people think he was a robot, and confused the real robots.
I have gotten into the habit of answering the phone in the Graham-Bell/Mr. Burns way by answering "Ahoy Hoy" whenever I get a number that I don't recognize. I figure that that's not going to be as useful for any training purposes, and is also pretty inoffensive, so even if I don't get a robot then it won't offend anyone.
> I figure that that's not going to be as useful for any training purposes
Um what? Why? It's just as much a sample of your voice, and if it's what you usually say on the phone then a recording of it will... sound like it's you on the phone.
This is going to highlight my ignorance of AI, so bear with me, but my rationale (which is probably wrong) was that they are training their model on my voice specifically for the word "hello". If I provide "Ahoy Hoy!" to them instead, and their system thinks that that is "hello", it might mess up their model a bit.
As I said, I don't really know what I'm talking about, that was just my rationale.
I just don't care. It's not like they can train a bot to convincingly speak like me from just one word. And if they can, the game is already over and we've all lost.
That said, I don't answer suspicious numbers and I won't move past "hello" until the caller identifies themselves.
That's going to be a major and widespread issue very soon.
Unfortunately, rulings such as this FCC's are ineffective to prevent it. If someone is already committing fraud, they obviously won't care if it's illegal to use an AI-generated voice.
If I immediately hear sound from the caller it's usually a valid call. If I wait several seconds and it's just quiet, it's an automatic dialer waiting for a voice response. I found it highly effective at weeding out spam calls.
Wonder how many secs of voice you need to replicate one. You can call a number programmatically, ask something silly. record the response and then recreate the voice. I can imagine one can do much harm. Like calling the voice's boss and tell him you fell in love with his wife and now resign.
This is why I love Google's new AI phone call screening feature. Some people get spooked by it and hang up, and sometimes spam calls get through via exploits like calling twice within a short time or somehow bypassing with a weird spoofed number (only happened 1-2 times so far)
I only answer the phone with "Who's calling?". If I don't want to talk to them, they get "this is his assistant, he's not available". If it sounds even slightly like a canned voice it gets hung up on.
I was once told that some automated dialing systems will listen for, and hang up/flag the number as another automated system, if you wait four seconds, say hello very clearly, and then say nothing else.
There are a series of gates. At the end is the scam. Each gate is designed to filter out those who will reach the end and not fall for the scam. Or in other words, by the time you are making the scam pitch, the scam is already done, because you know by then it will work.
The calls are just one of the early gates, as someone screening your call is likely not to fall for the eventual scam.
The gates don’t have to be clever for this to work. There merely has to be enough people that you are going to find that 0.1% who will fall for it.
I think it's about proof that the number puts them in touch with a real person. I suspect if the robocall gets enough engagement they'll even put an actual scammer on their end.
My other guess is that it's one of those things where it only connects to actual person if you say something. I could try actually talking to see what happens but now that I read on this thread that they record you for replay maybe not.
Absolutely this, I am confident that there are people out there who verify phone numbers from data leaks, selling off known “good” numbers to other nefarious people. They probably record it all now too and sell that.
Yep, I don’t say hello anymore either, if I don’t recognize the number. Makes things awkward sometimes, but this is the dogshit awful world we live in.
