I was a bit pissed off the other day when I looked up an old Twitter thread to find it had been spammed by someone at bland.ai . Not cool.

Despite the shitty tactic, I couldn’t resist the clickbait.

They provide automated phone agents and will call you for a demo, so I tried it. I was actually pretty impressed. I threw a bunch of nonsense and non sequiturs at her, but she patiently waited then steered the conversation back on track. If I spoke over her she stopped talking, listened to what I said, and responded appropriately.

Just for fun, I decided to pit her against Lenny so I forwarded the call to him.

Lenny is a series of cleverly-constructed canned responses designed to infuriate spammers and cold callers. The recordings are generic enough to keep them on the line as he waffles and wanders till they finally give up in frustration.

Here’s how it went:

She didn’t do too badly. Lenny is just a dumb series of fixed responses, but Bland.ai was unfazed and patiently tried to explain. When it was obvious that the conversation was going nowhere, she politely wound up the conversation.

“Don’t anthropomorphize computers – they hate it.” — Andrew McAfee.