YouMail is helping to identify deepfake phone calls intended to interfere with voting this election season.
The Irvine-based company last month announced that it’s partnering with information security company Pindrop on a platform using Pindrop’s technology to detect AI-generated speech in calls from YouMail’s network of 20 million phone numbers.
The partnership comes nearly a year after thousands of AI-generated calls impersonating President Joe Biden advised New Hampshire voters to not participate in the Jan. 23 primary election.
“We believe there’s going to be a lot of election-related problematic call traffic,” Chief Executive Alex Quilici told the Business Journal. “What we want to do is detect that as quickly as possible.”
The platform has already analyzed over a thousand members of Congress and political candidates running for office for the presence of AI-generated or deepfake audio, according to a release.
Consumer App
YouMail says it protects people from getting spam calls through its consumer app and by working directly with phone carriers.
The app is free to download but comes with paid services. It blocks unwanted calls, texts and voicemails with monthly plans ranging from $5.99 to $27.99, according to the company’s website.
Premium services for the higher cost plans includes a screening process that requires unknown callers to enter a certain number and say their name upon request.
YouMail also has a product called Watch. Designed for phone carriers, Watch collects data from call records and shares it with carriers who subscribe to YouMail’s services to stop robocalls at the source.
“Once carriers have that, they can figure out which customers made those calls and shut them down,” Quilici said.
The consumer side is currently YouMail’s main source of business, but Quilici said the company has “really decided to focus on the B2B side.”
“Once the scammers are calling consumers, it’s too late,” he said. “You really want to not just block calls when they’ve been made, but block them so they can’t be made in the first place.”
The company has raised about $15 million and garnered 13 million registered users across the U.S. and Canada since its founding in 2007.
Quilici, who originally came on as an investor and board member, has extensive experience in the industry, having co-founded an early version of Siri called Quack in 1999. The company was acquired a year later by AOL for roughly $265 million, according to news reports.
Scam callers are becoming more sophisticated in those they target such as elderly people with cognitive issues, according to Quilici.
“We view the world as getting more dangerous and we see [YouMail] being a key part in trying to stop those attacks on consumers and enterprises everywhere,” he said.
