- REALLY is perfecting a carrier-native AI agent that can place and receive calls on the subscriber’s behalf
- The idea is to free up customers’ time so they can do the things they enjoy instead of wasting time on their phone
- The T-Mobile MVNO says privacy comes first, with user data protected through a secure, end-to-end privacy architecture
The founder and CEO of REALLY, an MVNO that uses T-Mobile’s network, wants to clone subscribers’ voices so that they can use their phones less.
You heard that right. And if your first reaction is: really? That’s kind of the whole point.
REALLY CEO Adam Lyons says it’s all about getting people to put their phone down and go enjoy a hike in the woods or otherwise unplug. The AI-trained clone will take care of the tedious bits of your life, allowing you to do the things you love to do.
The key word here is “tedious,” like rescheduling a doctor’s appointment, canceling a subscription or talking with customer service. You probably wouldn’t want your clone to take calls from your close friends and family, at least not at this stage. Think of it more like a personal assistant or concierge.
“The mission here is really important to us. We don't think AI needs to be threatening. We think it can be seen as a good thing. Folks using their phone and being glued to the phone often forget that family and friends and nature are the important things in life. And that's what we want to bring back. We want to bring real connection back,” Lyons told Fierce.
Last month, Austin, Texas-based REALLY announced the REALLY Clone, a carrier-native AI agent trained on a subscriber’s preferences, voice and communication style. It’s still in beta, but the idea is to use the subscriber’s real phone number, requiring very little setup on the customer’s end.
“This is the beginning of Clone. It can do all these basic tasks very well. Eventually, we’d like to evolve it to handle more of the things that people don’t have the energy, the time or don’t want to do,” he said. “The goal is to have it get more sophisticated over time. Train it to learn more and more of your preferences, how you talk differently to your boss versus your family versus your friends.”
As for the all-to-frequent spam calls, REALLY says its Clone will not just block them.
“It picks up, plays confused, asks questions, and keeps the scammer talking as long as possible,” the company advises on its website. “You get a full recap and a running scoreboard of how much scammer time your Clone has wasted.”
Really focused on privacy
According to Lyons, they deliberately built the privacy layer before the AI layer because “you can’t ask people to trust AI with their phone number if you haven’t already proven you’ll protect their data.”
The company leverages Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI), which is protected data that includes call history, location and calling patterns. All the carriers have access to CPNI.
However, several of them have gotten in hot water for how they used it. For example, in 2024, the FCC fined AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon a combined $200 million for sharing CPNI location data without permission.
That’ s not the direction REALLY is going. “One of the reasons we were big on privacy in the first place is this is data that should be protected by the FCC,” he said. “We wanted to use that in a way where it is still private, but it can actually benefit the user versus being sold and monetized without permission.”
In order to achieve that level of privacy, REALLY built its own OSS/BSS platform in house that connects to T-Mobile’s network.
“It's very hard to move fast or integrate the newest technologies with software from 30 years ago, so we rebuilt it from scratch,” he said. “It's powered by an agentic software engineering platform purpose-built for telecom, which I think is also the first of its kind.”
REALLY taps Zebra experience
More than a decade ago, Lyons founded the online insurance comparison platform The Zebra, which grew into a company valued at more than $1 billion. He stepped down in 2018 and took with him the experience he needed to launch REALLY in 2022.
Telecom is a similarly heavily regulated industry with massively entrenched incumbents.
“One of the lessons I learned was it's much better to work with incumbents than against them,” he said. “Now it’s the most visited insurance comparison website. We hope to do the same in telecom.”
This may sound shocking to anyone who’s been in the telecom space for many years because it’s generally not well-known as super innovative in several sectors of the business. But Lyons said he wanted to align with T-Mobile because “they were one of the more innovative companies we’ve ever seen. We got right to work and they’ve been extremely helpful every step of the way, in letting us know what's possible, what’s not possible and where we can innovate a bit.”
The origin of REALLY
About that name. How did that come about? Lyons said when he set out to disrupt telecom and talked with friends, investors and industry associates about building a new type of network centered on privacy and encouraging people to put their phones down, he consistently heard the same reaction: really?
“I was like, you know, that'd be a great name for what we're doing and we just went with it,” he said. “Got really.com and here we are today.”
REALLY’s basic phone plans start at $50/month. The company isn’t revealing how many subscribers it has but Lyons said they’d like to hit 1 million by the end of next year. For reals.