Virtual assistant will screen your phone calls to block spammers

By Chris Stokel-Walker

You won’t be hearing from them anymore

Juj Winn/Getty Images

Nuisance phone calls could disappear with the help of a virtual assistant that screens out spammers before the phone even rings.

Robocalls, in which an automated recording pretends to be a human, are a common problem – there are an estimated 4.9 million every hour in the US alone. Simple block lists can screen some of these calls out, but they are only around 60 per cent effective, says Sharbani Pandit at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In an attempt to do better, Pandit and her colleagues have created a virtual …