Last year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received a record number of complaints about robotic marketing calls (robocalls) from companies selling various goods and services. In total, ordinary Americans received over 29 billion unwanted robocalls in 2016, more than double the number in 2015. According to the results of the current year, the number of intrusive calls may again double.
Many Americans do not even realize that they are talking to robots, because the latter have been taught to adapt to the answers and conduct a full-fledged dialogue. Robots no longer only distinguish between the words Yes and No, numbers and letters, but also reproduce the answers received. For example, if at the beginning of the conversation you call yourself John, then by the end of the conversation the robot will call you by name at least three times.
Also, robotic voices, which are absolutely no different from real ones, determine the level of irritability or interest of a person. Sometimes they deliberately divert the conversation to the side and even joke so that the person is not embarrassed by the marketing tone of the conversation.
For the first time in 20 years, smart sales robots have increased the average time of a marketing call to 5 minutes. Until 2016, this time was rapidly decreasing, as most Americans immediately hung up on an offer to buy something.
Companies providing telephone marketing services said that the efficiency of sales by robots increased by 120% in a year. Americans, however, are extremely annoyed by the misleading calls that sometimes ring several times a day (including at night).
Also, smart robots are often used by scammers to extract information about credit cards ah, social security numbers, etc.
For example, one Nigerian robotic system called 300,000 Americans in three months and collected data on 16,000 credit cards. The scammers didn't even have to process the data. The robots transferred the verbally received information to paper and gave the swindlers a detailed report. Previously, to obtain such a volume of data, hundreds of professional telephone scammers would have to be connected to the call.
In another scheme, the scammers received $54 million through calls on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The robot, in an agitated voice, threatened people with huge fines, litigation, and freezing of bank accounts if they did not agree to pay a fine of several hundred dollars. Brilliantly composed robotic phone call had a strong psychological impact on people and they quickly paid off their “debts”.
With the "phone bot epidemic" just beginning to spread across America, top FCC experts offer five helpful tips. They will help you save not only time and money, but also nerves.
First, ignore calls from unknown numbers. This is the simplest advice, which, of course, people who are waiting for clients (lawyers, accountants, doctors and other specialists) cannot take into service. Everyone else has the opportunity to listen a voice message and decide whether they should call the caller back.
By the way, robots rarely leave Voicemail. It is more profitable for them to call some other person than to leave a message to someone who does not pick up the phone.
Second, go to the National Do Not Call Registry online and block all your numbers - mobile, home, work, etc.
If you have already done this a long time ago, then make sure once again to block numbers from spam. The National Do Not Call Registry is a public (and therefore unreliable) resource and your phone numbers may have disappeared from a system that is constantly being attacked by hackers.
Thirdly, download very convenient and reliable applications on your smartphone Truecaller, RoboKiller, Mr. Number, Nomorobo or Hiya, which will automatically block ringer robots.
These applications are hated by all phone spammers in the world as the effectiveness of scams is declining. The robot cannot reach a person day or night.
Fourth, try to answer robots' questions less. The Yes and No you say are recorded and can be used to confirm your consent to buy a product or service. Sometimes robots say phrases like “Sir, if you answer no, then we will send you a subscription to only three magazines, not ten.” A person does not listen to this phrase, says “no” and after a while they will receive a bunch of unnecessary magazines with a bill ready for payment.
It is best not to say the words “yes” and “no” at all. If the robot asks if you hear him (Can You Hear Me?), then answer that you hear (I Can Hear You).
Naturally, the best tactic in talking to a robot is to completely ignore it. Be careful and try to understand as quickly as possible that you are not dealing with a living person. Usually the robot starts to “fail” after a long silence or non-standard answers, like I Can Hear You instead of Yes.
Fifth, always run the caller's number over the Internet.
Generally, Google identifies spammers who for a long time they call from the same numbers. You will be able to quickly understand whether the number belongs to a specific person / company or is used for fraudulent purposes. If you receive a call from a blocked number, never pick up the phone.
Finally, I advise all readers to transfer the phone call to the Silent position more often. Friends, relatives and colleagues - unlike robots - will always find a way to contact you ( Email, social networks, text messages, video calls).
Vadim Dymarsky
VKontakte is the number one social network in Russia. It has registered great amount users. Despite the fact that the social network is incredibly easy to use, sometimes problems arise with it. Here's an example: a participant in this Internet project visits his page and instead of the usual wall with posts and his own avatar, he sees the inscription “We detected suspicious activity on the page and temporarily froze it in order to wrest it from the hands of attackers.” This means that the account has been blocked and will need to be unblocked. How to do it? Why did the freeze happen? Let's find answers to these difficult questions together.
Why was the page frozen?
A lot of users ask this question, because they have not committed anything illegal. So what's the deal? Actually the answer is very simple. The fact is that the accounts of the participants social networks very often exposed hacker attacks. More precisely, they try to guess the password for the pages, and if this happens successfully, once on the user's page, the attackers begin to distribute malicious files and links, which often contain viruses. As soon as the project administration notices suspicious activity, it immediately freezes the profile.
To prevent this from happening, you need to remember a few simple rules. First, come up with as many complex password so that it can't be picked up. It must be at least 12 characters long and must contain numbers, letters and Special symbols type No.;%? and so on. Secondly, never and under no circumstances save passwords in browsers, since it is from there that they are most easily stolen by scammers using simple virus. And, of course, never give access to the page even to the most best friends- it could end badly for you.
Page unfreeze
Well, friends, we sincerely hope that you have learned simple rules, which we wrote about a little higher. Now let's move on to the unfreezing of the account. Doing this is not difficult at all. Go to home page project. In front of you you will see a sign that says "Restoring access to the page." If all else fails, then just follow this link vk.com/restore.
The first thing to enter is telephone number, or address e-mail box to which the page was registered. Enter one thing, enter the captcha in the window that appears.
You see your account. If this is it, then confirm this by clicking on the "Yes, this is the right page" button.
Now you have to wait until you come special code. If you previously entered a cell number, then the code will come in an SMS message, and if you have mail, you will have to check mailbox- there should come a link to restore access. Sometimes a code or message may arrive with a slight delay, be prepared for this.
Actually, that's the whole process. As you can see, there is nothing complicated about this.
If the code does not arrive within an hour, then the problem lies in something else. But what exactly? Take any anonymizer known to you and try to go to your page without entering your username and password. If it is not frozen, then there is a 99% chance that there is a virus on your computer that you need to get rid of. This virus modifies a file located on your operating system and redirects you to a completely different resource that only looks like VKontakte.
We will not go into details, but we will note that it is sometimes impossible to find this virus even with the help of antivirus software. Therefore, we offer you a simple solution. Download the Dr.Web CureIt! utility from the official website, which scans the system for malicious files and automatically changes host file to the original. Just run the utility and hit start. After some time (scanning can take from several minutes to several hours), you will be able to log into VKontakte.
And one more thing - if you are asked to send SMS or enter your number mobile phone, know that they want to deceive you. Even if you send a message, the page will not be unfrozen, and you will lose money in your account.
Banks are starting to use robots to communicate with customers and demand repayment of debts from them. Artificial intelligence does not take offense and does not violate laws, and its services are cheaper than human labor
“In the mass consciousness, collectors are bouncers with soldering irons to whom no law is written,” says Sergey Markov, IT director of ActiveBusinessCollection (ActivBK). - Of course, the stereotype is far from reality, and the main collector's tool is the phone. But the work is nervous: debtors often allow themselves to offend operators. We are all human, and there is a risk that an inexperienced operator will break loose and respond in the same spirit.
The subsidiary of Sberbank AktivBK has developed an artificial intelligence-based system that conducts a cultural dialogue with the debtor, selecting answers based on what was said on the other end of the wire. This helps eliminate the human factor and avoid fines for breaking the law. It is possible that such collector robots will become a ubiquitous phenomenon in the near future.
Debts and bots
Automation of work with clients is a noticeable trend in the banking market, but so far artificial intelligence, as a rule, only helps to process incoming calls.
Chatbots that can automatically answer the same type of questions in writing are actively used by many collection agencies and banks. For example, an application with such functions was developed by the Sentinel Credit Management agency (owned by Alfa-Bank). The bot can tell the client all the information about the debt, remind the date of the next payment in the form of a push notification, allows you to select the amount of the payment and the date of its payment, and redirects more complex questions in the chat to the operator. A similar product appeared at the Creditexpress Finance agency - it has a chat, the ability to call the operator and the online payment function.
There are also non-standard solutions in this area: for example, to the question “how are you?” The chatbot of Modulbank's online cash desk sends the entrepreneur up-to-date financial information - point opening time, number of checks, revenue, etc.
In 2012, Svetlana Sagaydak, Vice President of Sberbank, suggested that managers create and head a collection subsidiary of the largest bank in the country (AktivBK is 100% owned by Sberbank). “We set ourselves the task of attracting advanced market technologies in overdue debt collection management and wanted to create our own platform for testing such technologies,” Sberbank’s press service explained to RBC.
Initially, the "daughter" works with Sberbank on market terms, receiving about half of bad debts individuals. At the same time, the company constantly competes with private agencies, among which the rest of the Savings Bank debt is distributed. “No one really feels sorry for us here,” says Teplitsky. “If we were given the entire portfolio of debts, we would very soon turn into fat leeches.”
To save money, managers have created an intelligent CRM system that determines what time zone the client lives in, takes into account the gender, age, debtor's employment, and statistics on previous calls. The analysis of all these factors together makes it possible to find the optimal time for dialing and increases the number of successful negotiations with the debtor by 2-3%. “Given the huge volume of negotiations, this trifle is converted into very serious money,” says Markov.
Sergey Markov and Dmitry Teplitsky (Photo: Vladislav Shatilo / RBC)
On average, the agency receives a reward of 5-20% of the amount of the returned debt. Now AktivBK is already working with 27 banks (Opening, Binbank, etc.), this direction occupies about 25% in the structure of the company's revenue. Another quarter of the income comes from the collection of debts purchased from creditors under an assignment agreement, and the main turnover - about 50% - is provided by work with debtors of Sberbank. According to SPARK, the revenue of AktivBK in 2016 amounted to 990 million rubles, net profit - 375 million. There are about 1 thousand operators in the state.
Collect by law
From January 1, 2017, the work of collectors is regulated by the law “On the protection of the rights and legitimate interests of individuals in the implementation of activities to return overdue debts” (230-FZ). He imposed serious restrictions on creditors. So, the collector can now call the debtor no more than eight times a month, on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., on weekends from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., has no right to use hidden number phone and communicate with friends and relatives of the defaulter, etc. Despite the impressive list of prohibitions, the innovations did not help whitewash the market, lawyer Ivan Khapalin believes: “All of the above prohibitions can already be derived by interpreting the Constitution, so 230-FZ simply collected the rules into a separate legislative act.” “The law was a serious blow to the entire market: the number of phone calls dropped sharply, which led to massive layoffs of operators,” objected Sergey Markov from AktivBK. “And black collectors continue to threaten debtors.”
Chatbots and “dialer” robots have an important advantage – they are classified by law as an autoinformer and allow collectors to bypass the ban on interacting with debtors more than twice a week, emphasizes Alexander Kulikov, Deputy Director for Regional and International Development of the European Legal Service. The autoinformer can disturb the debtor up to four times a day.
Rescue neural network
In parallel with the main collection activity, AktivBK was developing its own human speech recognition system. “Previously, the quality control of the work of operators was carried out manually, listening to conversations. But it is impossible to listen to all conversations in general, and in one of a thousand conversations something may come across that will put an end to the company's reputation, ”says Sergey. In addition, operators, who are entitled to a bonus for the number of successful negotiations, often after the conversation indicated in the system a “promise to pay”, when in fact the debtor did not promise anything. The speech recognition system stops such tricks: it translates the verbal stream into text, looks for phrases necessary for the script or, conversely, forbidden phrases and issues a summary: how successful the conversation was and what is the forecast of the non-payer's further behavior.
By the beginning of 2016, the technology was ready and working. Markov presented it to the board of directors of Sberbank, whose members advised to "tighten up" the product and create a robotic collector that can not only recognize, but also synthesize speech. We made a plan according to which the development was supposed to take two and a half years. But it was not there.
Sergey Markov and Dmitry Teplitsky (Photo: Vladislav Shatilo / RBC)
At one of the meetings in Sberbank, she spoke Russian company, which offered to develop and sell its own robotic collector to Sberbank. The competitor AktivBK showed a demo version of the technology and promised to sell the finished product to the bank in a year. “I was at that meeting and the devil pulled me to say that we would make the same demo in two weeks, and the finished product in a year, only much cheaper,” recalls Sergey. “As a result, we ran on the ceiling for two weeks, but met the deadline.” Already at the beginning of 2017, the robot-collector passed the first tests inside AktivBK.
From the outside, the work of the system looks like this: a young man or a girl calls the debtors; the caller calls the last name, first name, patronymic of the debtor and asks to confirm the date of his birth. If the data matches those in the database, the voice announces the amount of the debt and warns of the consequences of non-payment. At the same time, the robot conducts a dialogue with the debtor, answering his questions, and if the interlocutor interrupts the collector, he asks to listen to the end. This is the main difference from dozens already existing programs- the system does not just voice a pre-written text, but “thinks” how to conduct a conversation depending on the interlocutor’s remarks. And only if the conversation comes to a standstill, the robot (and it was him) switches the conversation to a live operator.
Technically, the robot-collector from "ActiveBK" is a few recurrent (with the presence feedback) neural networks trained to act on a script with thousands possible scenarios dialogue development. To make the system work, operators listen to hundreds of hours of real conversations and supply the speech stream with subtitles, on which they then learn neural network. “The robot consists of three main blocks,” Sergey explains. “The first is the speech recognition system of the interlocutor, the second is the speech synthesis system that allows the robot to speak, and the third is the business logic that determines the meaning of what the debtor said.”
According to the creators of the robot, there has never been a technology with such functionality on the market. “Individually, IT tools to improve the efficiency of collectors have long been actively used both in chat bots and in the interactive voice interaction (IVR) system,” confirms Dmitry Pesotsky, Contact Center Solutions Promotion Manager at CROC. — Another thing is to collect all these technologies into a complex product and find your niche in the market. In this regard, colleagues have taken a step forward.”
"Iron instead of brains"
According to Sergey Markov, in August 2017, the efficiency of the robot-collector was 24% higher than that of live operators - so much more often debtors paid delays within two weeks after the machine called than after communicating with the operator. “The robot cannot be pissed off - he has a piece of iron instead of brains. Even if the debtor behaves incorrectly, the robot will not be offended and will not respond in kind - it simply does not have such expressions in the script, ”says Teplitsky.
Now the robot-collector calls a small part of Sberbank's debtors: out of 250 thousand calls made by the company per day, several hundred conversations fall to the share of artificial intelligence. Since August, ActiveBK has also been servicing some of the calls to help desk jar. “Now we are not only collecting debts, we have finally started doing something good,” Markov laughs.
The RBC correspondent spoke with the AktivBK robot - the voice sounds mechanical, but the system really recognizes the remarks addressed to it. True, an attempt to explain to the robot that the journalist is currently having problems with his work and that he will not be able to pay for some time was unsuccessful - the robot did not understand and said goodbye. According to the developers themselves, the robot is still “raw”: it does not recognize all phrases and often ends the conversation by redirecting the call to a live operator. Even if the technology reaches a new level, the robot will not be able to conduct complex negotiations - it is intended only for the first informing call, Sberbank confirms. “The operators themselves are now reduced to the level of a robot: they have to repeat the same type of phrases during the first call,” says Teplitsky. “The robot will save people from a huge share of routine work that does not require intellectual effort.”
According to Sergei Markov's calculations, the cost of a robot's labor is almost three times lower than the cost of an operator's work: a minute of automatic conversation costs ActiveBK 2.7 rubles, a minute of an operator's work costs 6.5 rubles. (however, these calculations do not take into account the initial investment in the development of the bot). Selling the services of a robot-collector to third-party banks will begin in the coming month: according to Teplitsky, agreements with the three “largest banks in the country” are already at the signing stage.
To make automated calls more efficient, the agency also plans to implement emotional labeling of conversations. “A person, for example, can say: yes, I will pay. Or maybe: yeah, now, I'll cry. The set of words is similar, but the meaning is diametrically opposite,” Sergey explains. The next step is to create new system under the working title "cyborg-collector", which will help the operator to conduct complex negotiations (by analyzing the dialogue and displaying information about the debtor and other tips on the monitor online).
“We do not pretend to replace a person with a machine - this is completely impossible,” says Sergey. “Machine learning will take away some of our jobs, but it will create more by making human labor smarter.” The head of Sberbank, German Gref, is more determined - he will cut half of the bank's 330,000 employees by 2025.
View from the outside
“Technology will whitewash the market and save people from routine”
Konstantin Ordov, Professor of the Department of Financial Management of the Russian University of Economics G.V. Plekhanov
“The need for a robot-collector was the result of a series of criminal reprisals against debt collectors. The shadow cast on the collection business forced the legislators to toughen the requirements for the market, which put the collection business on the verge of profitability. A cheap alternative to human labor in such conditions is a real find.
Sometimes one gets the feeling that the scripts developed by Sberbank have already made all their employees robots, so the interlocutor may not notice the substitution. But the main thing here is that the robot is not capable of emotions, it is impossible to “breed” it into aggression, to arouse pity in it. All this significantly increases the efficiency of the collector robot.”
“In two or three years, a third of conversations with debtors will be conducted by a robot”
Dmitry Pesotsky, Contact Center Solutions Promotion Manager, CROC
“Technologies based on artificial intelligence is a very promising niche: in two or three years, communication with clients of banks and collection agencies will be 30-35% using artificial intelligence. However, these technologies are still developing at the level of hype. The robot is not universal: its highest conversion will be at the soft collection stage, when the amount of debt is still small. Here, robots will remind you of debt. An experienced operator who can build a dialogue as flexibly as possible should talk to a client who has moved into the hard collection category.”
“Robots will replace collectors, as they replaced recruiters and lawyers”
Alexander Trifonov, co-owner of the legal service 48Prav.ru
“The robot collector is an absolutely working and large-scale story. It is obvious that this technology will greatly oust collection companies with a staff consisting only of live operators. Proof of this is robot lawyers and robot recruiters who are already successfully competing with human specialists. Savings are also evident: the cost of software development is really high, but in a few years its operation will not only recoup the costs, but also increase marginality by reducing payroll costs.”
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