Student team aims for year-end IsFAM Android MVP after challenge win

The student startup team 멋쟁이미어캣 said it aims to release the Android MVP of IsFAM, its voice-authentication service against AI voice phishing, by the end of the year, according to techm.kr. The team's stated goal follows its grand prize win at the FIN:NECT Challenge, run by the Korea Fintech Support Center and KakaoBank.

IsFAM pre-registers family members' voices and checks how closely a call voice matches the registered person, while also detecting whether the voice is AI-generated. It returns one of three levels to the user: safe, caution or danger. Speaker verification runs on the smartphone, while the more computation-heavy deepfake voice detection runs on a server.

The need the team cites is that listeners struggle to tell real voices from fakes. In a test with the team leader's parents, the parents could not correctly distinguish an AI-synthesized voice from a real one. In a test with people in their 20s, 3-4 out of 8 could not tell synthesized voices from real voices.

A family subscription model

Through mentoring, the team learned that the people who need protection and the people who pay may differ, and restructured the service around a family subscription. A younger family member installs the service, invites parents to a family group and pays for the subscription. After launch, the team plans to measure family-group invitation and voice-registration completion rates, retention, churn and free-to-paid conversion.

Team leader 이주호 said previous projects tended to lose momentum after about six months, but he has been engaged with the FIN:NECT Challenge for nearly a year. Before passing the regional preliminary round, IsFAM was mainly a project the team pursued while preparing for employment.

Once the consumer service is validated, the team aims to expand into a B2B business offering a deepfake voice detection API for telecom companies, financial institutions and call centers. In Silicon Valley, where the challenge's six winning teams met local founders, investors and company officials, a voice AI company named 마고 told the team it had proposed technology to telecom companies and call centers and run PoCs but struggled to convert them into contracts.