Man develops robot to waste telemarketers' time

One man has taken a rather unusual approach to dealing with unwanted calls from irritating telemarketers at all hours of the day. Instead of answering the phone himself he has created a robot that you can turn on when a telemarketer calls, just to waste their time!

Roger Anderson's invention analyses the telemarketer's speech patterns and replays pre-recorded responses - keeping telemarketers on the phone for as long as possible.

One example of the robot's stock responses is: "So, hang on. I haven't really had a chance to really wake up all the way. So can you just go a little slower - who is this?"

While other responses take a slightly more comical tone: "Aw geez, hang on there's a bee on me. Hang on. Ok, you know what you keep talking, I'm not going to talk though but go ahead and I'm just going to stay quiet because there's a bee."

Some of Anderson's calls have gone on as long as 22 minutes which is impressive given that Anderson's mission is to disrupt auto-dialers.

He said: "The goal is to have these robots answer if possible and break the auto-dialers and maybe it will stop their business practice."

Anderson has even launched a kickstarter campaign so he can implement different voices, accents and genders.

Just last week we discussed how some jobs could be under threat of being taken over by robots.

Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane has warned that as many as 15 million jobs could be under threat.

Insurance underwriters, paralegals, accountants and auditors are all said to have at least 90% chance of eventually being replaced by computers!