It's Lenny

“Lenny” is a bot designed to frustrate telemarketers by playing the role of an elderly man with an Australian or New Zealand accent who can barely keep a thought together for more than a few seonds. Running on something like an Asterisk PBX server, it plays a series of carefully-scripted short recordings in a loop, each one picking up after 1.25 seconds of silence on the line.

From Lenny’s history & why he isn’t Creative Commons on Reddit (/r/itslenny):

I am Lenny. I am the voice and I also planned and wrote the dialogue.

A friend of mine was getting a ton of spam calls at work. He was using Jordan the drunk Texan. It was amusing, but improbable (people aren’t usually so drunk they can hardly speak at work). I thought I could do better and give it a local accent. A simple goal was to improve on Jordan’s call lengths and increase the caller’s frustration.

Lenny’s high hit rate is the result of planning and a telemarketer’s desire to make a sale: I listened to spam calls and noted common patterns they used, and patterns all phone calls make for that matter. I kept his responses engaging but vague enough to never really fall apart if he responded “incorrectly” to a caller.

I needed to build a character, so I asked myself, “Who would be a telemarketer’s worst nightmare?” Answer: a lonely old man who is up for a chat, proud of his family and can’t focus on the telemarketer’s goal. His doddering ways were designed not just to infuriate and amuse, but to have callers overlook that he is a recording when the audio cues don’t line up/make sense in the call. I thought his meandering self-referencing responses would be a benefit in the unlikely event a caller made it all the way to the end and looped: oh boy, was I underselling his potential there! 😊

Lenny is named after and is a vague impersonation of an elderly widower that my same friend lived near. Lenny used to collect plastic shopping bags in a giant man-height stockpile in his back yard. Rats loved it. The real Lenny left us long ago, well before I made the recordings. He lives on here.

Here’s the “Lenny” script.

  1. “Hello, this–this is Lenny!”

  2. “Ah yes. Sorry–I can barely hear ya there.”

  3. “Yes … yes, yes.”

  4. “Ah, good! Yes, yes, yes.”

  5. “Oh, yes, yes. Oh, someone–someone did … did say last week–y’know, someone did call last week about the same thing–was–was that–was that you?”

  6. “Yeah, yes. Sorry, you–what–what was your name again?”

  7. “Well, it’s funny that you should call, because my third eldest, Larissa, yeah, she–she was talking about this, uh, just–just last week, and–you know–she’s–well, she is very smart. I’ll give her that, because she was y’know the first in the family to go to university and she passed with distinctions, you know–we’re all quite proud of her, yes, yes. So, um, yes she was saying that I should uh, look–you know, get into thi–look into this sort of thing. Uhm, so, what more can you tell me about it?”

  8. “I’m sorry, I–I couldn’t quite catch you th–catch you there. What–what was that again?”

  9. “B–uh, bit–sorry–again?”

  10. “Would you say that again–again, please?”

  11. “Yes–yes yes.”

  12. “Sorry, which company did you say you were calling from again?”

  13. “Well, you know–here’s–here’s the thing, ‘cause the last time that–that someone called up, ahh, and spoke to me, ah on the phone I got in quite a bit of trouble from the people here because I went for something that I shouldn’t have. Uh, I probably shouldn’t be–be telling you that, but um, yes, I–I think my–my eldest, Rachel, she, she ah, uhm, wouldn’t speak to me for a week, now, you know, that–that happens, you know, but um, but that really hurt and–and sometimes in family, you know, these things are–are quite important; you know, they’re more important that, uh, any, you know, bauble or phone call, or, or, or what–whatever it is.”

  14. “Ah yeah, since–since you–you put it that way, I mean you–you’ve been quite, uh, friendly and–and straightforward with me here–um, uh hello? … Hello? Are you there? … Uh, yes, sorry, this is–I have a–I have a bit of a–bit of a problem with this phone and, and my hearing is not so good. Um, yes, ah. What wa–sorry what were you saying again?”

  15. “Well, you know wi–with the world finances the way they are I know, y’ know, we’re not–we’re not allowed to spend as much as–as what we were, er, I mean how, how, or wha-how–how’s this going to uh–how is this going to work?”

  16. “Well, yeyuh-tha–tha–that does sound good. I mean, you–you have been very patient with an old man here and uh, hah, it’s, ah, yeah, I mean it’s–it’s something that I’ve been told that I should be looking at. Ah, um, my third eldest, Lariss–Larissa, she ah–I think I mentioned Larissa before? Yeah, yeah, she, um, she said that, that–that I should be going through something like this, but, uh, it’s just a matter of what, you know, what–what is most appropriate for-” Ducks start quacking in the background “-for the time I guess what–sorry, can you just hang on for one second, here? Hang on.” Ducks quacking, footsteps, door closes, Lenny returns and picks up the phone. “Yes. Sorry about that. Ah, Sorry, what were you saying there again?”

  17. Go to 5.

The web site Crosstalk Solutions has the Lenny sound files and pointers on how to set them up in Asterisk. The sound files are in µ-law format, and can be played with a command similar to the following:

play -t raw -e u-law -r 8000 -c 1 FILENAME