I don't know why there is no feature on iPhone to block callers with no phone number or labeled by caller ID as "Unknown". Those are the biggest annoyances. Block by area code would also be nice.
Agreed. I never answer a call from an unknown number. I let voicemail handle it.
When enabled, Silence unknown callers "uses Siri intelligence to allow calls to ring your phone from numbers in Contacts, Mail, and Messages.”
Apple is reading your mail? /s
Apple has always read your mail. They’ve been extracting phone numbers and calendar dates from messages for years.
What they haven’t been doing is harvesting this information so they can spam the crap out of you with it as soon as you hit the next Google page.
Oh, nearly forgot … /s
LOL... Figured you'd notice the /s tag I used. While it took awhile for them to come around (too, TOO long IMO) Google doesn't read your email for ads either which you implied they do yet failed to acknowledge they don't.
I'm sure there's going to be readers that miss both of our /s tags and don't realize we weren't to be taken seriously with our comments.
Now here’s a question for the phone phreakers and hackers out there: I’ve actually gotten calls on my iPhone from spammers using MY OWN number. How is that possible?
I don't know why there is no feature on iPhone to block callers with no phone number or labeled by caller ID as "Unknown". Those are the biggest annoyances. Block by area code would also be nice.
Agreed. I never answer a call from an unknown number. I let voicemail handle it.
For some business people that might not be a very good option.
Now here’s a question for the phone phreakers and hackers out there: I’ve actually gotten calls on my iPhone from spammers using MY OWN number. How is that possible?
It's possible because caller ID was not built with security in mind. It was expected that everyone could trust the information being sent. For a slightly more technical explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing ;
I would call the ability to distinguish a certain pattern (in this case phone numbers and its related references as opposed to any random numbers) an AI since it requires a neural logic learning.
In the programming world, we call that a "regular expression".
Seriously though, the variety of ways in which phone numbers can be represented in text and email can be a challenge for automated systems. I don't think it's a stretch to claim "AI" is at work to find them. Simple AI perhaps, but AI nonetheless.
I’ve often said that nuclear launches that start off WWIII will be because of “regular expressions”.
Why would this require Siri? It's simply referencing the incoming # against a database. It's extremely straightforward from an engineering perspective.
Siri is the name of a variety of AI-based technologies. In iOS12 "siri" reviews your mail and messages for data that looks like phone numbers, email address and the like and presents these to the user as needed. For example when receiving a call from a number not in your contacts, Siri may furnish a message "Maybe: PERSONS NAME", where that name has been automatically gathered from a email/message source. Similarly these contact details can be easily added to existing or new contacts.
This new feature likely takes that existing iOS 12 capability and provides it with the skill to automatically reject unfamiliar numbers/facetimes. There is an expectation that the feature does a little more to thwart spam calls, since Apple would be able to gather a statistical model of spoofed phone numbers.
Collecting phone numbers from several sources and reference that list when a call comes in. Not sure if that counts as AI, seems more like a marketing gimmick to call it Siri.
Simple. It’s AI because they use AI techniques to provide this feature.
Comments
What they haven’t been doing is harvesting this information so they can spam the crap out of you with it as soon as you hit the next Google page.
Oh, nearly forgot … /s
Agreed. I never answer a call from an unknown number. I let voicemail handle it.
While it took awhile for them to come around (too, TOO long IMO) Google doesn't read your email for ads either which you implied they do yet failed to acknowledge they don't.
I'm sure there's going to be readers that miss both of our /s tags and don't realize we weren't to be taken seriously with our comments.