Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a tool that could shed some insight into and potentially combat robocalls.

The automated system, dubbed SnorCall, can reportedly characterize the content of robocalls, thereby revealing the scope of the robocall problem as well as the associated scams being perpetrated.

Source: North Caroline State University

According to its developers, SnorCall records robocalls made to any of the more than 60,000 phone lines dedicated to this effort and used exclusively by the North Carolina State University researchers for monitoring such calls.

The calls are reportedly transcribed and analyzed using a machine learning framework dubbed Snorkel, which can characterize the nature of each of the calls, enabling SnorCall to label the topic of each call.

A trial of the proof-of-concept SnorCall assessed roughly 233,000 robocalls over nearly two years, extracting the phone numbers from which these calls were made along with information revealed in the call, including call back numbers.

This information, according to SnorCall's developers, could potentially be used to identify and subsequently prevent certain types of robocall-associated fraud.