Effective immediately, the regulation empowers the FCC to fine companies that use AI voices in their calls or block the service providers that carry them.
Because there are legitimate reasons for some robo calls. Appointment reminders and confirmations, school weather closure announcements, two-factor login verification, etc.
It would be a good trade. Lose the few semi-useful legitimate ones to get rid of the overwhelming majority which are malicious scammers and conservative dickbags.
Text if school is cancelled. Throw 2fa out the window. Phone numbers are not identity. Text appointment reminders. Literally nothing needs a robo voice that isn’t better as text.
Phone numbers actually can be an identity, but generally that’s just business numbers. There’s also a lot of phone numbers that aren’t cell phones and can’t get texts. It’s a lot easier and cheaper for companies to design one system. Depending on the company, they’ll still do text/email reminders for things. Old people like phone calls, so companies need to know their audience too. Again, cheaper to build a single system, so that tends to be the default.
Source: I design call centers for a living, personally done probably 200+ projects over the years, in banking, insurance, retail, transportation, state/local govt, etc.
Here’s an idea… why not ban all robo-calls?
Because there are legitimate reasons for some robo calls. Appointment reminders and confirmations, school weather closure announcements, two-factor login verification, etc.
How about ban non-opt in robocalls?
You can do all this things without robo calls. There are no robo calls in Germany for example.
I thought I lived in a pretty backwards part of Germany but your corner must be extremely off the grid!
To just name one example in Germany: Verification via robo call in WhatsApp.
Oh, I genuinely didn’t know there are robo calls in Germany, never encountered them - always used sms or other kinds of verification. My bad.
Today, history was made. For the first time someone politely admitted they were wrong on the internet
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It would be a good trade. Lose the few semi-useful legitimate ones to get rid of the overwhelming majority which are malicious scammers and conservative dickbags.
No there isn’t.
Text if school is cancelled. Throw 2fa out the window. Phone numbers are not identity. Text appointment reminders. Literally nothing needs a robo voice that isn’t better as text.
What if you’re blind
Then you clearly don’t matter to Mango.
Blind people use special assistive software on their phones so they can hear text
Radio. Text to speech. Having someone who cares about you.
You want your doctor to broadcast your appointment reminders over the radio?
My doctor can afford to call or text or have a secretary do so.
In 2024, have a human call for reminders for every client every single day for every appointment… yeah right. Enjoy that while it lasts.
If you don’t have the time to call all of your patients, you don’t have the time to provide medical care to them.
Phone numbers actually can be an identity, but generally that’s just business numbers. There’s also a lot of phone numbers that aren’t cell phones and can’t get texts. It’s a lot easier and cheaper for companies to design one system. Depending on the company, they’ll still do text/email reminders for things. Old people like phone calls, so companies need to know their audience too. Again, cheaper to build a single system, so that tends to be the default.
Source: I design call centers for a living, personally done probably 200+ projects over the years, in banking, insurance, retail, transportation, state/local govt, etc.
iirc, they are banned… to cell phones, with very limited exceptions.
but that relies on honest callers, and sufficient resources being available to adequately enforce.