Nathan Chantrell.net: Lenny, The bot that fools telesales callers

I mentioned in the last post that I send all but a select few callers on my landline straight to voicemail but that’s actually no longer true. Thanks to a casual comment by @ichilton on Twitter I’ve recently switched to diverting calls from unknown numbers to Lenny.

Lenny who? Lenny is an Asterisk dial plan which together with a set of very convincing recordings works as a bot to fool telesales callers into thinking they are talking to a real person. Lenny will answer then wait for the caller to speak and when they stop he moves on to the next recording, it really is very convincing and there are some great recordings of people having lengthy conversations with him on this YouTube channel.

Lenny is very simple to set up, you can find the voice files attached to this forum post and full instructions for setting it up here but briefly you just need to add the following dialplan into your /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf

[from-internal-custom]
;# // BEGIN Lenny Remake
; version 0.3.2 copyright: none claimed. Enjoy!
exten => 53669,1,Answer
exten => 53669,n,Set(TIMEOUT(absolute)=600)
exten => 53669,n,Set(MACHINE=0)
exten => 53669,n,Set(OPTION=5)
exten => 53669,n,Set(TALK_DETECTED=0)
exten => 53669,n,Set(RECORDING=${UNIQUEID})

exten => 53669,n,MixMonitor(/tmp/Lenny/${RECORDING}.wav)
exten => 53669,n,NoOp(Recording will be available: /tmp/Lenny/${RECORDING}.wav)
;exten => 53669,n,Playback(en/this-call-may-be-monitored-or-recorded)

exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playit(Lenny1))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playit(Lenny2))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny3))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny4))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny5))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny6))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny7))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny8))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny9))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny10))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny11))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny12))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny13))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny14))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny15))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny02))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny03))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny06))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny08))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny09))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny10))
exten => 53669,n,Gosub(playitonce(Lenny14))
exten => 53669,n,Playback(en/tt-monkeys)
exten => 53669,n,Hangup

exten => 53669,n(playit),NoOp(Lenny speaks and repeats until reponse)
exten => 53669,n,Set(LOCAL(lennyclip)=${ARG1})
exten => 53669,n(oncemo),Set(TALK_DETECTED=0)
exten => 53669,n,Background(lenny/${lennyclip})
exten => 53669,n,AMD(2500,1500,800,5000,100,50,3,256)
exten => 53669,n,NoOp(${AMDCAUSE})
exten => 53669,n,GotoIf($["${AMDCAUSE:0:17}"="INITIALSILENCE-25"]?reststop)
exten => 53669,n(mach),WaitForSilence(700,3)
exten => 53669,n,Goto(humn)
exten => 53669,n(reststop),WaitForSilence(800,2)
exten => 53669,n,Goto(oncemo)
exten => 53669,n(humn),Return

exten => 53669,n(playitonce),NoOp(Lenny speaks once)
exten => 53669,n,Set(LOCAL(lennyclip)=${ARG1})
exten => 53669,n(noresponse),Background(lenny/${lennyclip})
exten => 53669,n,AMD(2500,1500,800,5000,100,50,3,256)
exten => 53669,n,NoOp(${AMDCAUSE})
;exten => 53669,n,GotoIf($["${AMDCAUSE}"="INITIALSILENCE-2500-2500"]?noresponse)
;exten => 53669,n,GotoIf($[${AMDSTATUS}=HUMAN]?humn2:mach2)
exten => 53669,n(mach2),WaitForSilence(2000,1)
exten => 53669,n(humn2),Return

exten => 536691,1,NoOp(Rerouting inbound call...)
;exten => 536691,n,Flite("After the beep, enter extension or press pound for Lenny.")
;exten => 536691,n,Read(SENDTO,beep,7)
;exten => 536691,n,GotoIf($["foo${SENDTO}" = "foo"]?5:6)
exten => 536691,n,Set(SENDTO=53669)
exten => 536691,n,System(echo "Channel: local/${SENDTO}@from-internal"> /tmp/lenny.call)
exten => 536691,n,System(echo "MaxRetries: 0">> /tmp/lenny.call)
exten => 536691,n,System(echo "RetryTime: 3">> /tmp/lenny.call)
exten => 536691,n,System(echo "WaitTime: 30">> /tmp/lenny.call)
exten => 536691,n,System(echo "Context: bridgit">> /tmp/lenny.call)
exten => 536691,n,System(echo "Extension: 4">> /tmp/lenny.call)
exten => 536691,n,System(echo "Priority: 1">> /tmp/lenny.call)
exten => 536691,n,System(mv /tmp/lenny.call /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing)
;# // END Lenny Remake

Copy the audio files to /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/lenny and make sure the directory and contents are owned by the asterisk user & group.

Reload the Asterisk dialplan with: asterisk -rx “dialplan reload”

and then you can check it is working by dialling extension 53669.

You can then divert any unwanted calls to this extension to have some fun. I did this by creating a custom extension in FreePBX with a destination of local/53669@from-internal and making this the default route for unknown numbers coming in via the PSTN trunk.

To get call recordings emailed to yourself you can use the following shell script called from cron, you’ll want to make sure you have lame and the mime-construct packages installed.

email="email@example.com"
subj="Lenny Recording $(date)"

cd /tmp/Lenny
for i in *.wav; do
if [ -e "$i" ]; then
file=`basename "$i" .wav`
lame -h -b 64 "$i""$file.mp3"
rm "$file.wav"
/usr/bin/mime-construct --file-auto "$file.mp3" --to $email --subject "$subj"
rm "$file.mp3"
fi
done

So far I haven’t recorded anything of interest, it seems most the telesales calls I have been getting are pre-recorded messages but as soon as I get something good I’ll upload it.