At least 26.9% of unwanted inbound calls now open with a machine voice, measured over 10,987 honeypot calls.

The FCC put AI-generated voices under the TCPA in February 2024, and nobody had peer-reviewed how much unwanted traffic is machine-placed or synthesized rather than replayed. An interactive voice honeypot using language-model personas on real US numbers recorded 10,987 calls over 66 days, scoring each opening with an audio fingerprint, a commercial synthetic-speech detector, and blinded human listeners. Of 7,233 greeted calls, 13.8% opened with a recording heard on another call and 13.1% with fresh audio labeled synthetic, giving the 26.9% floor, with 9.9% silent connections and 54.2% fresh audio labeled human (arXiv 2609.11137).