Way back in July of 2014, I wrote about how I stopped telemarketing at my house. Little did I know that my efforts to combat and disrupt unsolicited telemarketers would eventually lead to me giving a TEDx talk about it!
Some of you may know that, in an effort to stop telemarketing, I created a robot to talk to them. It’s an interesting story and I posted some audio at the beginning of 2016. My story was picked up by Gizmodo on February 1, 2016 and things got really crazy from there.
Anyway, Fast forward to November 4, 2016 and I find myself on stage at TEDxNaperville in Illinois speaking in front of about 500 people at a beautiful venue. I’ve never spoken in front of a crowd like that, and it was amazing.
Don’t get me wrong – as a phone guy, I love call centers. But as a phone guy I also love the telephone network. The Public Switched Telephone Network has been around for about 140 years and it is crushed under the burden of unsolicited telemarketing. Blocking doesn’t work. Their predictive dialers simply call the next sucker. I think the only solution (short of abandoning the entire network) is the Jolly Roger Telephone Company. Here is me story about how I’m disrupting the scammers, spammers, and crooks, which make up most of the unsolicited telemarketing industry.
By the way, this goes for cold callers too. If your business is struggling to handle cold callers (ask your receptionists, Investor Relations team, or any admins for your CxOs) then I also have a solution for you. It’s called a Biz-Bot and it will handle all your pesky cold callers for all your employees.
But anyway, here is the talk!
This was really funny. Although it would be interesting if you can develop something on Andrpid/iOS (granted you can set your smartphone accept calls only from contact list etc). I have not personally been “blessed” with this sort of calls but I have friends who did, somehow once you’ve got called by one you’ll be called by all.
Thanks Catalin!
You’re right about getting called by all. There’s just no way to stop them. I am working on smartphone integration, but the smartphones do not allow apps to “take over” the speaker and microphone of an active call. The best I can do right now is “summon a pirate” via text. Text me while you have the telemarketer on the phone and I will call you back immediately so you can join the bot into the call by pressing ‘answer/hold’ and then ‘merge’. Thanks for watching it! I hope your phone remains free from telemarketers!
Roger,
Two things…I just watched your Ted talk and I’m pretty sure I am “Richard”. If so, I am flattered!. Secondly, I follow a medical blog called Quackwatch.org. The author deals with many subjects but I was surprised to find this. Hopefully, some of it may be of use.
http://www.quackwatch.org/15Ads/scraperpro.html
Thank you Richard!!! That call cracked me up. Thanks so much for capturing someone great audio for the tedx talk! I’ll email you a separate thanks.