Instead of just hanging up every time “Sharon, your local Google specialist” calls, one person decided to create an artificial intelligence that is as effective at wasting telemarketers’ time as telemarketers are at annoying you.

The Jolly Roger Telephone Co. was created by Roger Anderson, and it's a robot that talks to telemarketers (or anyone you want) by starting with “hello?” and keeps the conversation going by responding during silent moments with affirmatives like “yeah,” “uh-huh,” and “right.”

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The fun part is when the telemarketer starts to get suspicious or says something confusing to the robot and it responds with a few different things, like telling “honey” it’s on the phone right now and asking the telemarketer to repeat, or going into a short story about how it just woke up and needs some coffee. Anderson records these calls and puts them on his blog for your enjoyment.

You can use his robot for yourself by following the instructions on his blog:

Anderson told Mashable he’s been working in telephones since the early ‘90s, and he started getting telemarketing calls on his landline four times a night.

“The reason why people are canceling their landlines is almost always because of telemarketers,” Anderson said. “It’s offensive to me that the telemarketing industry is killing off landlines.”

One day, Anderson said his 12-year-old son answered the phone, and when he hung up he said, “Dad, they said a bad word.”

After that, Anderson set up what is essentially a telephone spam-blocker, which effectively made all autodialing telemarketers hang up because they weren’t reaching a person. It wasn’t stopping the incoming calls though and wasn’t causing them enough pain.

Then he experimented with adding a small greeting that said “hello” a few times to get them to connect, and it worked. Autodialers tend to hang up unless they hear a human voice, at which point they’ll patch in a waiting telemarketer.

“So then I said, ‘OK, let’s see how far I can take this thing,’” Anderson said. “I sort of created an algorithm of noise and silence detection that just kept them going.”

And it works. He has been improving it over time, trying new phrases and things to keep people on the line as long as possible.

“Maybe the telemarketing firm will take you off their list for real when they realize that all they do is get burned by a robot every time,” he said.

Anderson’s robot is getting more popular as more people are finding it on the Internet, and although a voiceover IP service’s cost per call is almost negligible, as more people use it the cost does add up, so he set up a donation button on his blog.

He records every call but he's getting several hundred calls per hour so he doesn’t have time to listen to every call coming through. If you do connect a telemarketer with his phone robot, Anderson said to send him a message with the time you made the call and he can send you a recording.

“It is entertaining and hopefully serving a vital function for humanity,” Anderson said.