In South Korea, several cities are now using artificial intelligence to check in on elderly people around them who live alone.
Several town halls in South Korea, including the two largest cities in the country, Busan and Seoul, have decided to test a new service of artificial intelligence: to hear from their elderly relatives who live alone. The platform, developed by Naver, the Korean Internet giant, is called Clova CareCall, it looks a bit like ChatGPT with voice.
In short, the machine has been programmed to construct fairly simple conversations on its own. Then, we add a voice synthesizer and a voice recognition system so that she can communicate directly on the phone. The interlocutor does not need to type anything on the keyboard of his computer or on his smartphone, it is enough to speak.
Follow-up work with isolated elderly people
In South Korea, many elderly people are isolated, sometimes in a situation of great loneliness. The town halls therefore want to make sure that they are doing well, but there are not always enough civil servants in the social services to do this monitoring work. It is therefore computers that now call these citizens twice a week to ask them how they are.
The conversation is rather simple: the machine, with a rather natural feminine voice, asks the person how they feel, if they slept well, what they ate. The program can congratulate its human interlocutor and react to the keywords it perceives, such as comments on food: “Ah, an orange? Well done, it’s good for your health!” Artificial intelligence is also able to remember personal information for each human it processes. If on Monday, the human tells him about back pain, well on Thursday, the machine will ask him how his back is or if he had time to go to the doctor.
In the event of a problem, the human takes over
Human workers intervene if the artificial intelligence spots a problem. If the elderly person does not respond to calls over several days, someone from the town hall or the police is sent to see if something has happened. Similarly, if a disturbing element appears in the conversation, if the person is no longer understandable or seems in distress, the machine signals this to an official who calls himself to take stock. He then has access to the archives of the last conversations to see the last exchanges.
While there is much debate about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, governments are also trying to make maximum use of these new programs to improve public service. Town halls say older people are responding very well to the new service. For example, in Haeundae district in Busan, 95% of users asked to continue using it after the trial period.