Lenny is a best-of-breed incoming telemarketer baiting system. It simulates a kindly but slightly addled old man--the perfect target for scammers--and through a simple Asterix system that waits for a pause, then plays a random response, can fool the telemarketer into repeating themselves over and over.

It's remarkably effective at wasting telemarketers' time. I once received a tech support scam call and I managed to conference in Lenny right at the start. The call lasted 40 minutes; they kept shuffling Lenny around to different people so it took forever for them to realize it was looping.

Now whenever I get a telemarketer call on my cell--illegal in the U.S., but no one seems able to do anything about VoIP calls from India--I rush to conference in Lenny and hope it "takes". Sometimes they stay on the phone but usually they disconnect. Lenny's starting to become famous!

The next phase in this war is speech recognition. If the answer bot can pull out a key word like "Windows" or "virus" and repeat it back to the telemarketer ("Virus? I have a virus? Oh, what do I do?"), it is highly likely to pass the Turing test and waste an extra ten minutes of the poor scammer's time.

I've only recently heard of Lenny (late to the party), but think some of the videos I've heard are hilarious.

I know "he's" been around for a while, and runs on a purely manual random delay system, but I wonder if Lenny could be updated with modern technology, to do a bit of rudimentary voice recognition for better interaction with the scam caller?

I know that his existing script is very cleverly generic and timed to work in with most telemarketing scripts, but I think if it was improved just a bit more, we could end up with quite a convincing respondee that would burn up more scammer time, and hopefully make a small dent in the enthusiasm of these con artists...

I believe it (or some other bot) detects silence on the other end of the line to trigger playing samples.

So it can insert "u-huh" whenever the salesman is done talking.

from what I've read, it is meant to wait for a pause (It uses Asterisk, which in turn has some basic detection for pauses and the such, which the script uses)

Is that the one with the ducks? I'm pretty sure there's a more recent version too, where the guy gets accused of being a robot?

They all have Ducks. That's the end of the script, then it goes around and starts again.

Yes, there was one when the caller realised that he is a recording.