Meet Ben Ren, Co-Founder at scam.ai, who joined the BotCast #10 to answer our usual questions on building with Voice AI.
Who are you?
Hi everyone, my name is Ben. I am building scam.ai, a scam prevention platform that is end-to-end preventing all digital new eras of AI scams, including voice scams, and as you can see, this is my Brad Pitt face. We do a lot in deepfake detection because nowadays you really can't trust anything online anymore, and we are at the forefront of preventing this from happening to enterprises but also day-to-day average users.
How did you end up using voice AI?
For us, because we are Scam AI, we prevent scams from happening. Actually, one of our co-founder's family was scammed by a voice clone. It was really a tragic moment when his aunt received a phone call from her daughter, and the daughter's voice was used to directly call the mom and say, 'Oh, I was in a car crash,' using voice clone technology. The family was scammed of a huge sum of money, and that was the moment when we realized voice technology is a fantastic technology, but if it gets into the wrong hands, average people might get into trouble. Therefore, Scam AI wants to prevent these kinds of things from happening by preventing state-of-the-art AI systems from going rogue in this kind of situation, preserving what is real and what is not.
A moment of joy and pain using voice tech.
For me, voice technology is a fascinating double-edged sword. The moment of joy is really just listening to how productive people can be. For example, we partnered with Fish Audio recently, utilizing their super realistic TTS system to answer scam calls. But on the other hand, the pain really comes down when we find a lot of the current scam calls are already backed by AI agents. We found the technology is also used by scammers to actually destroy average people's lives, and I think this is the pain of the technology being a double-edged sword. How can we really prevent the bad things from happening to both average users and enterprises? That is the heart of what we do at scam.ai.
What lesson would you share with other builders?
For us, one of the bitter lessons that we've learned along the way is to build something that people really want right now. The technology that we're building is deepfake detection, which some people say is a technology for the future when we cannot identify anything online as real or not. It's a cool technology, but it is really important to understand who actually benefits from this. There are things, for example, like street lamps. These are public goods that might be very useful for society, but they don't necessarily have a strong demand from individuals because these things have super strong positive externalities, but they might not have strong individual demand. I think this is one of the bitter lessons that we learned: how at the start of the company to build something that solves specific pain points for a specific type of person.
Where do you see the industry in 12 months and in 5 years?
I see the voice AI industry really booming within 12 months, where the majority of the interactions that happen between humans and other AI agent systems will be majorly voice. It will be replacing the keyboard very soon because all UI/UX is surrounded by how humans can give accurate instructions, and therefore voice is the most natural way to do it before brain-computer interfaces actually work. For five years, I actually see it on the opposite side, where it might be so day-to-day that this is the new norm, and the problems might already be completely solved, where people are focusing on other modalities of input like brain-computer interfaces, for example.
