Thanks as always for (almost) everyone’s support and kind words. I think we can crush outbound telemarketing if we all work together!
Many of you have suggested an app for Android/iPhone and I agree that it would be awesome if there were such a thing. I have researched it, and unfortunately the application side of the smartphone does not have access to the speaker and microphone during an active call. In other words, any robot app would not be able to “take over” the conversation and speak for you.
I should also note that the current robot runs on a pretty beefy telephone system capable of some advanced noise/silence detection and, in the future, speech recognition. I’m not sure it would be feasible to cram all of that into a smartphone app.
The real answer is to develop an app to initiate a conference into the robot’s via a regular telephone call. Basically, we need to have one button that leaves the talkpath open to the current call while dialing a second number. In 911 call centers, this is called “no hold conference” and they allow the 911 operator to continue speaking with the caller while conferencing in a second party. If we could get Apple and Google to support a no-hold-conference button that dials a programmable telephone number, then we can make it much easier to use.
I believe the best place for the robot is in the cloud. Fund the Kickstarter campaign so I can enhance him, add voices, dialects, and languages. And if he serves us well, he may even learn to understand English.
However, in the meantime, conference him in please!
Thank you all!
Roger
I’ll drop at least 100$ if you can promise the output of this app…maybe with an option when it’s ringing to “send call to jolly roger”. it would be fantastic.
Hopefully I’ll eventually be able to convince the providers (i.e. android/ios) to add the “send to my robot” feature. I am about ready to launch the service and it will email you the audio so it can be your voicemail if you’d like.
Really useful, but re there any update for this post?
You’re not thinking outside the box far enough. You need selective call forwarding. You need the app not to block a call but you need the app to automatically forward to called to a robot. I mean this could be done manually as well, the Jolly Rodger telephone caller ID app could pop up and say “we think this is a telemarketer, what do you want to do”, while the phone is ringing. You could push a button to : forward to a robot, send to regular voicemail or answer the call. The app won’t have to be very powerful or take up much space at all, it will do one of three things ignore the call answer the call or forward to call to a Jolly Rodger robot. . Just a simple caller ID app with the option to forward the call to a bot instead of block. There are literally hundreds of caller ID apps that will block a caller, but what’s the point? With current technology, the cell rings once sometimes even twice before the decision is made to block the call. Enough forwarding of a number to a bot and they’ll stop calling. Just a simple way to selectively call forward to a Jolly Rodger robot, the calls you don’t want to deal with.
Also there could be an optional list inside of the app, a whitelist and Blacklist within the app itself, to let only certain calls through. And all others get automatically forwarded to a Jolly Rodger robot? Or any combination
Have you see the iOS app RoboKiller? It seems to do some of the same things your doing. Maybe research how they are achieving it. I’m giving it a try but I already like your robots better. But the iOS integration is really nice.