The problem of robocalls (自动语言电话) has gotten so bad that many people now refuse to pick up calls from numbers they don't know. By next year, half of the calls we receive will be scams(欺诈).We are finally waking up to the seriousness of the problem by supporting and developing a group of tools, apps and approaches intended to prevent scammers from getting through. Unfortunately, It's too little, too late. By the time these "solutions" become widely available, scammers will have moved into cleverer means. In the near future, it's not just going to be number you see on your screen that will be in doubt. Soon you will also question whether the voice you're hearing is actually real.
That's because there are a number of powerful voice processing and automation technologies that are about to become widely available for anyone to use. At this year's I/O Conference, a company showed a new voice technology able to produce such a persuasive human-sounding voice that it was able to speak to a receptionist and book a reservation without being found.
These developments are likely to make our current problems with robocalls much worse. The reason why robocalls are a headache has less to do with amount than accurateness. A decade of data violation of personal information has led to a solution where scammers can easily learn your mother's name, and far more. Armed with this knowledge, they're able to carry out individually targeted campaigns to cheat people. This means, for example, that a scammer could call you from what looks to be a familiar number and talk to you using a voice that sounds exactly like your bank teller's, tricking you into "confirming" your address, mother's name, and card number. Scammers follow money, so companies will be the worst hit. A lot of business is still done over the phone, and much of it is based on trust and existing relationships. Voice processing technologies may weaken that gradually.
We need to deal with the insecure nature of our telecom networks. Phone consumers need to work together to find ways of determining and communicating what is real. That might mean either developing a uniform way to mark videos and images, showing when and who they were made by, or abandoning phone calls altogether and moving towards data-based communications-using apps like FaceTime or WhatsApp, which can be lied to your identity.
Reliability is hard to earn but easy to lose, and the problem is only going harder from now on.
