🎬AI Granny

CURRENCIES

THE BIG IDEA/TECH
Hello, this is AI Granny. May I ask who’s calling?

Do not try to help Daisy set up her printer—she is engineered to frustrate you. Daisy is a new British AI granny released earlier this month by UK-based phone company Virgin Media O2. Her job is to waste phone scammers’ time. In one instance, she kept them on the line for 40 minutes.

How she works: Fraudsters frequently target the elderly for scams, so the company attempted to create the perfect victim. Daisy is simply an AI chatbot with a grandma's voice, trained on hours of recorded conversations with one of her creator’s real-life grandmas.

While she doesn’t intercept calls, Daisy has multiple phone numbers that have been pushed out to online lists used by UK scammers. But instead of giving in to the con, she rambles about her grandchildren, birds outside, and her cat and gets easily confused about technology. She sometimes gives scammers fake bank info.

AI granny is a drop in the bucket. Making scammers’ days a little harder is a promising start, but phone scams have become so common that someone reading this probably had to pause mid-sentence to silence one. Last year, phone scammers stole over $1 trillion around the world, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. -GN.

DIGITS
Pricey coronation

$91m: How much King Charles III’s coronation cost British taxpayers last year. The lavish affair — the nation’s first coronation since that of Charles’ mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in 1953 — included a gold carriage, a display of jewels, and a concert at Windsor Castle featuring Katy Perry, Lionel Richie, and Andrea Bocelli.

 While Buckingham Palace claimed the celebration would stimulate the local economy, critics have called it excessive for a time when Brits were struggling with rising energy and grocery costs. CNN noted the King’s parade cost as much as 24m free lunches for London schoolchildren.

SHOWER THOUGHTS

NEWS
Round the continent

• The WHO Africa Director-Elect, Dr. Faustine Ndugulile died while receiving medical treatment in India yesterday.

• Tanzania has decided to honor its contracts with an Adani Group unit despite a U.S. indictment of its billionaire chairman Gautam Adani on accusations of bribery and fraud.

• International buyers of Ghana’s cocoa have made upfront payments to the tune of half a billion dollars in a dash to secure supplies and avoid another season of heavy losses. Cocoa futures rose to an all-time high this year.

• Cape Town is pushing to become the first African city to be listed as an elite Marathon circuit. The other seven include: New York, Tokyo, London, Boston, Chicago, Berlin, and Sydney.