Jolly Roger Telephone Company

The NY Times recently published a piece on Robocalls and How to Stop Them. Among their solutions, they recommend a service called Jolly Roger Telephone Company as a means of antagonizing the telemarketer you get connected to. Once you've got a human on the line, you patch in a third party robot to keep the conversation going in a frustrating way.

There's a full feature on the creator, Roger Anderson, available here that explains his reasoning for making it and how the tech works. Simply put:

While the simple robot does not possess anything near artificial intelligence, it does understand speech patterns and inflections, so it can monitor what the telemarketer is saying, and then do its best to try to keep the person on the end of the line engaged.

There's plenty of amusing examples of the stilted back-and-forths, and even a Best Of compiled by Anderson. Part of me feels bad for the human but not that bad. Check some of these out:

• Vegas Telemarketer suggests meth - can't tell if he gets it or if he's just annoyed.
• Are you on meds? - excellent quick assumption.
• That's When YOU answer ME - short, sweet and perfectly frustrating.
• Air Conditioning Contractor Catches On - finally, they get it.

Roger Anderson is an American hero for making this thing.