Speaker 1: I'm rich Damiro and this is a rich On Tech
Speaker 1: quick hit. We all hate robocalls and now a new
Speaker 1: app wants to do something about that. It's called Firewall,
Speaker 1: and it's pretty powerful. This one basically blocks all callers
Speaker 1: that are not in your address book. It will send
Speaker 1: them straight to voicemail. Now to learn more about it
Speaker 1: is Greg Cohene. He is the co founder and CEO
Speaker 1: of ad hoc Labs in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: Greg, thanks for joining me, Hey, thanks for having us.
Speaker 1: Okay, so tell me about ad hoc Labs, because you
Speaker 1: guys are well known for another app that you've had
Speaker 1: for a while called Berner.
Speaker 2: What's that one all about?
Speaker 3: Sure? So we've had Burner in the market for over
Speaker 3: five years now, and Berner is a second line app.
Speaker 3: So you can get extra phone numbers from Burner and
Speaker 3: you can use that to not have to give out
Speaker 3: your private number in lots of different situations, everything ranging
Speaker 3: from short term transactional things like if you're posting or
Speaker 3: responding to an ad on Craigslist, or if you're starting
Speaker 3: a side door need a number for customers at work
Speaker 3: or for you know, a public audience or something like that,
Speaker 3: and so Burner is a great way to give out
Speaker 3: a number that's not your private personal cell phone and
Speaker 3: keep some things off of that private personal number. But
Speaker 3: what we realize along the way is that we still
Speaker 3: were having issues with our first lines, both on the
Speaker 3: team and just obviously around in the marketplace. Consumers everywhere
Speaker 3: are sort of complaining about robo calls pretty constantly. It's
Speaker 3: a very hot topic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a huge, huge problem. So the new app,
Speaker 1: Firewall is is kind of a answers a question that
Speaker 1: I get all the time. Because there's a million robo
Speaker 1: call apps out there. I don't really like many of them.
Speaker 1: This one is something that does. It does things a
Speaker 1: little bit differently. It blocks everyone except the people in.
Speaker 2: Your address book.
Speaker 1: And I get that question a lot, people like, how
Speaker 1: can I can't just get a napped that does that?
Speaker 2: Now you can do that. So that's how it works.
Speaker 3: Huh, that's exactly it. We actually saw a lot of
Speaker 3: it's like that on Twitter ourselves, and that you know,
Speaker 3: Burner itself actually has a robo call screening function in it,
Speaker 3: powered by a third party API and app called normal Robo.
Speaker 3: They're friends of ours and one of many one of many,
Speaker 3: excuse me, robo call blocking apps out there, But what
Speaker 3: we realized was that the blacklist approach just wasn't getting
Speaker 3: the job done. Scammers are just too good and there's
Speaker 3: too many reasons for them to try to sort of
Speaker 3: evade different tactics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of people will block a phone number
Speaker 1: on their phone from a robocaller, and.
Speaker 2: I'm like, that does nothing.
Speaker 1: They're just going to call it a different number two
Speaker 1: seconds later, yeah, or spoof.
Speaker 3: A legitimate one, right, And that's one of the big
Speaker 3: problems that you know, the carrier industry has not been
Speaker 3: able to figure out. So Firewall takes things sort of
Speaker 3: into our own hands and we basically block all the
Speaker 3: calls unless we know they're from somebody you know or
Speaker 3: from somebody who've designated. So we like to think of
Speaker 3: it as a little bit of an extreme solution. It
Speaker 3: is definitely a sort of a nuclear solution on robo calls,
Speaker 3: and it blocks everything. It does it effectively the calls
Speaker 3: you want get through. The calls that are unknown, they
Speaker 3: just go to voicemail, and you can respond very effectively
Speaker 3: to that voicemail. We have very high quality transcription and
Speaker 3: we even have a little feature sort of a nod
Speaker 3: to burner where if you have a voicemail from an
Speaker 3: unknown caller and you're not sure about them, you can
Speaker 3: dial them back with an anonymous temporary phone number.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because the last thing you want to do, Like
Speaker 1: I just did this morning, I got a robo call
Speaker 1: and I said, let me just check to see who
Speaker 1: this is. I call them and now they've got my
Speaker 1: number for real.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they know it's you're alive, Mark, right exactly.
Speaker 1: So now the way that this works is you have
Speaker 1: to use call forwarding, and so tell me about that.
Speaker 1: How are you going to get folks to get over
Speaker 1: the uneasiness of you know, forwarding all their calls to
Speaker 1: you guys?
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for asking that question. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 3: a thing that is not for everybody, right, But basically,
Speaker 3: the way it works is you forward your phone number
Speaker 3: to us and we screen it in the cloud. And
Speaker 3: because we're able to, you know, use sort of software
Speaker 3: to do that, we can run all kinds of algorithms
Speaker 3: on it. We can not just white list and blacklist,
Speaker 3: but we can try to intelligently predict things and we
Speaker 3: can get better over time with that. So in order
Speaker 3: to be able to do that, we need to be
Speaker 3: able to see all the callers, and that's how our
Speaker 3: solution works. And you know, we think, based at least
Speaker 3: on the feedback we've had during our beta, that for
Speaker 3: people who really get a lot of robo calls, or
Speaker 3: people who you know more and more just don't really
Speaker 3: want to be on the phone at all. If it
Speaker 3: don't need to be, it works really well.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I also noticed that the app, because I set it
Speaker 1: up on my phone, it lets you easily add callers
Speaker 1: to your white list. So if you get a call
Speaker 1: that you want to be able to call again, because
Speaker 1: the default is that every one in your contacts is
Speaker 1: on your white list, you can obviously change that. But
Speaker 1: then when someone calls for the first time that's not
Speaker 1: and they get blocked, you can just add them to
Speaker 1: your white list for the next time.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right. So if you know, if someone from
Speaker 3: the office calls in a different phone or a conference
Speaker 3: room or something, you can you can add that easily,
Speaker 3: or it's the gym, whatever it might be that you
Speaker 3: do want to get, just swipe to add it to
Speaker 3: your right list.
Speaker 1: Now, you mentioned that this is not for everyone, So
Speaker 1: here's the thing before kids, I probably wouldn't care if
Speaker 1: all my calls went straight to voicemail unless they were
Speaker 1: in my address book. Post kids, I think immediately to Okay,
Speaker 1: my kid gets hurt at school, there's an issue. Some
Speaker 1: random teacher calls from her cell phone to my phone.
Speaker 1: It doesn't go through, So kind of explain to me.
Speaker 1: This is definitely a high powered robo call solution. There
Speaker 1: are some trade offs.
Speaker 3: I think trade offs is exactly the right word, right, So,
Speaker 3: if you're using a blacklist app, the tradeoff you're making
Speaker 3: is that a bunch of robo calls are going to
Speaker 3: get through, and that can be noise, and that can
Speaker 3: be a problem for lots of folks. Funnily enough, a
Speaker 3: lot of people don't really answer their phone because they're
Speaker 3: so hesitant to get a robo call that they might
Speaker 3: miss that important call from the school. Anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's ironic, actually.
Speaker 3: Right, And then you sort of still have to deal
Speaker 3: with voicemail and so in our system, you know, the
Speaker 3: trade off is it's possible to miss a call you
Speaker 3: want if it's a previously unknown caller. But the general
Speaker 3: idea is they can leave a voicemail and you can
Speaker 3: quickly call them back or better yet text them back,
Speaker 3: which is sort of what people want to do even
Speaker 3: more of these days.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: It's interesting to me, by the way, just to mention,
Speaker 3: you know a lot of people more and more are
Speaker 3: using text first over phone, right, And that's a generational thing.
Speaker 3: But I think it's also you know, a general trend.
Speaker 3: Since you know, we've got av plus penetrate eighty plus
Speaker 3: percent penetration with smartphones, everybody just texts first, right, So
Speaker 3: more and more people aren't calling, They don't call each other,
Speaker 3: they don't answer the phone, they don't necessarily check their
Speaker 3: voicemail audio. And so if it's all texting, almost the
Speaker 3: only calls are robo calls. Now more and more they're
Speaker 3: likely to be bad calls.
Speaker 1: It kind of feels that way, unless it's someone in
Speaker 1: your address book, which is the kind of the beauty
Speaker 1: of something like this solution. So iOS thirteen Apple announced
Speaker 1: at their event that they are going to build in
Speaker 1: some call screening smarts, and I think that one of
Speaker 1: the features they mentioned was that unknown callers can be
Speaker 1: sent to voicemail. So what does that mean for an
Speaker 1: app like Firewall? I mean, obviously you guys did your homework.
Speaker 1: Is there still a place for this with iOS thirteen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly right, and we see that as a
Speaker 3: nice validation. I mean, this is a this is a
Speaker 3: sort of an approach a lot of people want, right,
Speaker 3: which is to be able to screen on wanted callers. Apple,
Speaker 3: you know, has a history of doing things that you know,
Speaker 3: where they'll take a step in a direction and they'll
Speaker 3: leave the developer ecosystem to take you know, lots of
Speaker 3: steps and go farther and so, you know, I think
Speaker 3: their solution may work for some folks. Ours has a
Speaker 3: lot more features, right, among other things. For example, you know,
Speaker 3: we have two tiers of voicemail, right, so that your
Speaker 3: known callers get one and your unknown callers will get
Speaker 3: a different one. We actually do screen out the known
Speaker 3: global callers out of the back end. You know, we
Speaker 3: have the anonymous call feature, and you know, so in
Speaker 3: various ways, it's we think our app is sort of
Speaker 3: a more of a power solution, but it'll be interesting
Speaker 3: to see how people adopt that and how sort of
Speaker 3: ultimately we fit in with people's needs and you know,
Speaker 3: so the feedback has been very positive so far, but
Speaker 3: we're really looking forward to seeing what a wider audience
Speaker 3: thinks beginning today and.
Speaker 1: Again the app is Firewall. It's four dollars a month
Speaker 1: after a fourteen day trial. Greg, is there any chance
Speaker 1: this will ever come to Android?
Speaker 3: Absolutely? Yeah. We have been working on Android prototypes internally,
Speaker 3: and obviously you know we're waiting to see what kind
Speaker 3: of feedback we'll get from the iOS version, but that's
Speaker 3: a very likely outcome for us.
Speaker 2: Greg, thanks so much for joining me today.
Speaker 3: Thanks very much, Rich.
Speaker 1: Greg Cone is co founder and CEO of ad Hoc Labs.
Speaker 1: The app again is called Firewall. You can find it
Speaker 1: on iOS right now. And if you like the podcast
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Speaker 1: And since this quick hit is new, let me know
Speaker 1: on social media if you like it. If you do,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll do more. You can find me at rich
Speaker 1: on Tech. I'm Rich Damiro.
Speaker 2: I'll talk to you real soon