Will Carter's profile on Product Hunt | Product Hunt

Will Carter

Co-founder, Ad Hoc Labs

#110145@wcrtrnodesnoop.com

Activity 5 Made 1 Hunted 107 Following 114 Followers

Upvotes (19)

Joined on November 20th, 2014

Followed Topics

User Experience, Tech

80 points

Comments

💬

Hey, co-maker here. We’ve spent 6 years building up expertise in the phone comms space with our flagship product Burner, and today we’re releasing our first second product, Firewall. This product was built with love, but also hate: a hatred of disruptive and annoying phone calls! There are a lot of good apps there for blocking calls (nomorobo, robokiller, etc.) but they all work on the same basic blacklist model: try and identify bad numbers and block them from getting through. The problem with this is that scammers are usually a few steps ahead of the game and the blacklist model is really just whack-a-mole ad-infinitum. Furthermore, there are a lot of calls we get that we don’t want but aren’t illegal. Gyms, car salesmen, politicians… whatever random people happen to have a phone number...can all ring us at any point of any day too, and those calls are just as disruptive. Firewall works in the opposite way. By forwarding *all* calls to our system, we can allow through (to VoIP / in-app calling) only the people you’ve selected explicitly to have “phone privileges” to be able to ring your phone. This can be everyone you know (all of your contacts), or a tailored list that you can easily add new callers to. Everyone else either gets blocked completely (known robocallers) or screened to a high-quality voicemail flow . So instead of being disrupted with every phone call, you can check who is calling and see what they want, then choose to call or text them back at your convenience. For those of you wanting to declare phone call bankruptcy, we think this product could be for you. We got a lot of positive feedback and good suggestions from beta users over the past few months, and we’re eager to hear what a wider group of PH users thinks about it. So, questions and comments are very welcome!

2yr ago

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@tommyent fair point. One thing we explicitly are doing with the responses is delaying them to try and skirt some of the issues around the bot keeping up a coherent real time conversation. The owner of the phone number can also intervene at any point, as the conversation the bot is having with the ghosted contact is visible. These are all good points though, we've tried to be considered in our design with the the understanding that part of the point was to be a little provocative and tease out some of the implications of having a bot act on your behalf.

on Ghostbot for Burner

5yr ago

💬

Very cool, I like the idea that you could effectively use this for pushing high confidence / important stuff into slack. Maybe it already does this but would be great if it also archived emails that were pushed to Slack so that next time I had to load my inbox I wasn't seeing things I'd already probably seen.

5yr ago