Tinkoff virtual assistant will distract scammers by talking to robots

The telephone secretary “Defender Oleg” created by Tinkoff Bank was taught to distract scammers with the help of robots that imitate a conversation with a real person. The bank’s press service said it had launched a “factory of humanoid robots” that will keep attackers on the line.

After the subscriber receives a call from the scammer, the assistant will include one of the conversation scenarios with characters from the robot factory. They include “an elderly man who, while talking, looks for his glasses to hear better” and “a young mother who is trying to cope with an active child on the playground.” Robots react to specific phrases of scammers, they can ask something again, doubt their honesty, and get distracted by external events.

For this innovation, a model was created based on artificial intelligence, which analyzed more than 40 thousand minutes of calls from scammers, including “trigger phrases”, after which they were ready to continue the conversation. After experiments with the participation of expert psychologists, robotic characters were developed, each of which has its own character and speech tricks to keep the scammer on the line.

The bank believes that this mechanism makes it possible to reduce the number of successful attacks on telephone subscribers, as well as to quickly monitor and receive new fraud scenarios. The pilot project of the robot factory was launched in April, it is now available to about 500 thousand. In the next month, everyone who has an assistant “Oleg” will be able to connect to it, regardless of what cellular operator they have and whether they are clients of the Tinkoff ecosystem “

Laura Keffer