Alex Quilici Podcast Transcript
Alex Quilici joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Alex Quilici. Alex Quilici is an entrepreneur with over 25 plus years of experience in the tech industry. Holding a PhD in computer science from UCLA, Quilici’s expertise spans telecommunications and security, boasting over 30 patents in these fields.
Today Quilici holds the title of CEO of YouMail, a totally free robocall blocking app and call protection service. For mobile phones since 2007, Quilici leads a globally distributed team spanning seven countries, driving the company’s mission to enhance communication safety and effectiveness. Under his direction, YouMail launched the Robocall Index in 2015, offering valuable insights into the landscape of robocalls in the United States.
A testament to his commitment to consumer protection and technological advancement. Quilici’s influence extends beyond his company serving on advisory boards and recognized as a national authority on robocalls by regulatory bodies and media alike.
Well, good afternoon, Alex. Welcome to the show!
Alex Quilici: Hi, Brian, thanks for having me on.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. And thanks for joining. I know we’re a couple hours difference here in the L. A. area, Malibu, a beautiful place. Like I said, I spent some time in Orange County and love that place going up there. So. Appreciate that and Alex, we’re going to jump right into your 1st question here. With a career that spans over 2 decades and holding over 30 patents, can you share 1 or 2 patents that you’re most proud of and how they’ve contributed to achievements in telecommunication, excuse me, telecommunications and security?
Alex Quilici: Sure. There are actually two. So, 1) is basically communication fingerprinting for the detection of bad phone numbers. So, I’m really proud of that one that underlies everything we’re doing it at my current company email. The idea that patent is simply that if you can catch audio signatures that the bad guys leave when they, they make phone calls, whether it’s in voicemail or in conversations or other places, you can build a big database of those and then quickly match.
One audio signature with another to recognize new bad behavior. So, you find a scam. You’ve got the audio of it. You see new calls come in. That audio can be matched and there’s a lot of work to this, but it can be matched into the database and that allows for really sophisticated, you know, 1 call almost 0-hour blocking.
So, I’m super proud of that. When the whole team put that together, there’s been a number of patents since the original. The other one is just my first. So the first patent was basically using speech recognition to grab information off the Internet back in the days a little bit before smartphones.
And I’m really proud of that 1 because we use the technology underlying that to prove you could build a voice portal that allowed people to do all sorts of stuff. And it was deployed by AOL and had millions of users. So those are my 2 favorites out of the portfolio.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely love it. Obviously, the first one was your baby.
I can hear that. But I love the 1 where you are again on the forefront out there on the edge fighting back against people really the bad people that people whether they’re making these annoying spam calls or they’re doing something more nefarious. So, I appreciate the share on those.
And Alex, the next question is – since taking the helm at YouMail in 2007, you’ve led the company through significant growth and innovation. What have been the key factors driving YouMail’s success, especially in such a competitive space?
Alex Quilici: So, it’s interesting. I think there’s two things. The first is perseverance. We’re still around.
And so that wasn’t obviously going to be the case, right? So, we started off as a voicemail company trying to sell carriers on a better cloud based voicemail that that struggled we moved to a consumer voicemail company because we discovered so many people using our app and that was struggling.
And then we finally kept going and moved to what we’re doing now with call blocking, both for consumers and for carriers, which is, you know, actually had some real growth and success. And so, I think part of it is just not stopping. It, we kept going and the other was illustrated by the fact we changed.
We went from voicemail for carriers, voicemails to consumers, and then call blocking for consumers and now carriers and enterprises. So, we, we’ve been willing to pivot. So, I’d say perseverance and pivoting are what ultimately led to success here.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Love the story. Obviously, pivot those words been worn out, but it’s such a word that I think it’s a staple now because of covid.
But appreciate that really do. And perseverance is key to any company success and, you know, that as an entrepreneur. So appreciate that and Alex, the robocall index launched by email has been a game changer in understanding and combating unwanted calls. What inspired this initiative and how do you see its impact on both consumers and policy makers?
Alex Quilici: So, I wish I could say we had some grand vision with the robocall index, but it started off with us asking a question, which is we wanted to know how many robocalls were out there so that we could track progress on the problem. And we discovered that we had a large base of users of our app. And from that base, we can start making some really interesting estimates.
And that led us to realize that there were billions of calls, and we thought that was interesting and we published it and then it just sort of took off because there was no measurement like that out there. And so, we just became the de facto standard for looking at the scale of the problem and progress on it.
And it’s had a life of its own. I mean, it obviously gets me on the media a lot to talk about it and the threats and what consumers can do. But I think we’re even more proud of the fact that it’s been the basis underlying legislation. Like, what do we do to lower these numbers? Lots of groups and government and other places look at those numbers that we put out every month.
To see, are they making progress? They’ve done a bunch of enforcement actions. Did that lower the volume of robocalls? Is the mix of robocalls changing? Not every robocall is bad. And what we’ve seen is that the scam calls have gone down by 80 percent in the last 4 or 5 years, given all the effort on that.
There are other calls that are still out there, spam, et cetera, but, you know, our indexes, which shows that. So, I’m just really proud that we decided to measure this and publish it. And it’s just taken a life of its own, which has been great.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And I was just going to highlight that you’re actually not only really moving the needle, but you’re measuring it.
You can show how you’d move the needle. And again, we’re aligning that with the policymakers is really a way to kind of validate all this great work that you’ve been doing. So, I appreciate that. And Alex last question of the day, given your expertise and leveraging AI to solve software challenges. What are some of the most promising applications of AI and telecommunications security that you’re really excited about?
Alex Quilici: Well, so one of them we’re already doing, which is there’s AI embedded in what email does and recognizing these bad actors, but it’s a very basic form of AI. And it’s, you know, looking kind of post hoc. So once an audio, we get an audio clip, we’re actually looking at to see what was going on and doing the voicemail fingerprinting and all that.
What I’m most excited is about the real time applications of AI. You can imagine that this is going to go to where AI based. Good guy. Tools are watching what you do. They’re watching grandma’s conversations on the phone to make sure grandma’s not talking to a scammer. And if it detects a scam in that conversation, then it stops it.
We can watch text message conversations and all sorts of other things. So I think the application of AI to more quickly recognize problems is a huge 1. I also think it’s necessary because the bad guys are using AI already to generate their scam emails and help them do voice cloning and all sorts of other stuff.
So, for me, it’s the application of AI to do. More rapid detection of problems in a whole bunch of scenarios. We haven’t even touched yet.
Brian Thomas: And I really do like that. You’re highlighting some of that stuff to stay ahead of the bad actors. As you know, there’s billions of dollars in fraud every year, just by bad actors, and they use different technologies, different venues and platforms and so forth.
So, I’m glad that it’s reassuring for me that we’ve got people like you out there on the front, like I said, on the front lines. Fighting this fight for us and helping the people that are really vulnerable to these scams. So, I appreciate the share and Alex, it was such a pleasure having you on today.
And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Alex Quilici: Oh, thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Alex Quilici Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
