Cloning a voice used to take a studio. Now it takes a short recording and an off the shelf AI tool. Running a scam script across a thousand calls used to take a call centre. Now it takes a bot.

The phone is still where accounts get recovered, payments get moved and claims get filed, and it still trusts voices. That makes it the easiest place for a machine voice to do damage. It is why deetech created BotBlock.

The phone has no liveness check

Identity teams solved this problem for onboarding years ago. A photo of a face is not a face, so KYC added liveness: a check that a real person is in front of the camera. The phone never got that check. Voiceprints, security questions and an agent's own ear all ask whether this is the right person. Almost none ask whether it is a person at all, and a cloned voice is built to pass the first test.

Stop the scam before hello

BotBlock checks a call in its opening seconds, before an agent or an IVR acts on anything the caller says. A cloned voice is still a machine voice, whoever it claims to be, so BotBlock treats it like any scam bot and stops it before it can reset a password, change a payment or lodge a claim.

How BotBlock works

  • Three verdicts. Every checked call is Human, Unknown bot or Known agent, from its opening seconds. A cloned voice is a machine voice, so it is caught like any other bot.
  • A question before any block. A keypad prompt or a callback gives a real person a way through, including people who speak through a synthetic voice every day.
  • Every call, or on demand. Screen whole lines, or let agents press Check this call and trigger checks before risky steps like a payment change.
  • Approved agents as the exception. A few machine callers are welcome, like an assistant a customer sends. Registered agents prove who they are with signed calls, and each line lists the ones it accepts. Every other machine voice gets the question.
  • No voiceprints. BotBlock tells people from machines. It does not identify anyone or store voiceprints.
  • Where calls already run. Native connectors for Twilio Flex and Amazon Connect, with anything else over SIPREC or the API.

Why it is a studio bet

We build where AI creates a problem that existing products were not designed for. Voice cloning and scam bots are that shift for the phone channel. A voice is no longer proof of a person, and contact centres have no reliable way to tell a person from a machine.

BotBlock builds on deetech's core strength: detecting synthetic voices fast and accurately, which recently put deetech first on an independent audio deepfake benchmark. The new part is bringing liveness to the phone: a check that a real person is on the line before anyone acts on the call. That is where identity and KYC providers come in, and where we would rather build with partners than around them.

See it

BotBlock lives at deetech.au/botblock. The deetech blog makes the full case in The Rise of the Machine Caller.

A voice is no longer proof of a person. BotBlock checks before anyone acts on it.