That’s a fair concern and I won’t pretend it away. Robocall spam predates AI by decades — predictive dialers and prerecorded scams already made billions of calls a year — but AI absolutely makes it cheaper and more convincing, and I get calls like that too.
Two honest observations from working in this space: the scam operations don’t need open-source projects — they already run on cheap hosted APIs and have for years. And the actual fix lives at the carrier layer, not the software layer: STIR/SHAKEN attestation, enforcement against the VoIP providers who knowingly sell to spammers, and liability for carriers that terminate that traffic. Software bans won’t stop them; making unverified caller ID worthless will.
What a self-hosted runtime does change is who legitimate users have to trust — a clinic or a bank running voice agents on-prem instead of streaming call audio to a third party. That’s the use case I care about. But yeah, the spam problem is real, and it’s going to get worse before regulation catches up.
That’s a fair concern and I won’t pretend it away. Robocall spam predates AI by decades — predictive dialers and prerecorded scams already made billions of calls a year — but AI absolutely makes it cheaper and more convincing, and I get calls like that too.
Two honest observations from working in this space: the scam operations don’t need open-source projects — they already run on cheap hosted APIs and have for years. And the actual fix lives at the carrier layer, not the software layer: STIR/SHAKEN attestation, enforcement against the VoIP providers who knowingly sell to spammers, and liability for carriers that terminate that traffic. Software bans won’t stop them; making unverified caller ID worthless will.
What a self-hosted runtime does change is who legitimate users have to trust — a clinic or a bank running voice agents on-prem instead of streaming call audio to a third party. That’s the use case I care about. But yeah, the spam problem is real, and it’s going to get worse before regulation catches up.