Using chatbots against voicespam: analyzing Lenny’s effectiveness

Without any AI or speech recognition mechanism instead relying entirely on a set of 16 pre-recorded responses, Lenny is able to trick many people and keep conversations going for many minutes, and in one case up to an hour! Spammers on average spend 10:13 minutes talking to Lenny, and these conversations have an average of 58 turns! On average, a caller hears 27 turns of Lenny, which corresponds to 1.7x repetition of the whole script. Surprisingly, in only 11 calls (5%), the caller realizes and states that he is talking to a recording or an automated system.