ALICE, Voiceless Assistant for Voice Asissitant Devices

Assistance for elder people with Voice Assitant devices with no voice, just a button carried by the user for interaction.

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Inspiration

EU with more than 100 million people aged 65 years or more, these part of our society needs special attention and care. Tele-assistance is only helping a small percentage of the elder population. We are involved in new technologies, specially with Natural Language Devices. In Spain Covid19 has strike hard and the news present old people dying alone. We thought about a solution to help our elders with Voice Assistants devices and a button to help them to interact with the devices.

What it does

Our solution connects a Voice Assistant (Alexa or Google) without invoking them via voice commands. We use a commercial button and assign the click of that button with specifics tasks:

  1. One click: triggers the Voice Assistant to tell the Today’s reminders (Pills to consume, doctor appointments and any activity to remember as birthdays or tv shows).
  2. Hold the button: Sends a push notification to the mobiles defined to be notified, normally the elder assistants or relatives.

How I built it

We used several technologies, but the core is AWS that allows us to connect the different pieces, Voice Assistant (Alexa, working on the Google Assistant), the button (Flic) and the APP to manage the reminders (Adalo), notifications and use reports. All the pieces are managed with an integrated communication web service to allow fast link between components.

Challenges I ran into

The most challenging issue was to find a way to pass the information to the voice Assistant. Fortunately, we did it using AWS allows to comunicate with the Voice Assistant and receive the button input to connect all the pieces. Thanks to free to code apps like Adalo we have been able to design the pilot app with no code and in a matter of hours.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Provide a cheap solution to our elders to get them assisted and avoid more deaths of grandparents alone without notice. In the technical aspect, finding a new approach in the natural Language devices not seen before (as far as we know).

What I learned

We have learned a lot in the field of no code ecosystem, and I am impressed on how easy is to implement a pilot with these tools. AWS is another amazing ecosystem to be able to launch initial projects. Without these solutions such an agile approach for new projects would be impossible. We have extended our knowledge in the Natural Language for Alexa and finding its weakness in the remainders handling.

What's next for ALICE, voiceless assistance for Voice Assistant Devices

Since pilot is working, we need to move to the production phase. We need investors for helping us to:

  • Build the single sign on solution (unifying the components for a seamless user creation).
  • Unify the cases in a single database solution for an automatic case handling and easy escalation.
  • Migrate to an AWS Production Platform for live usage.
  • Find partners (governments or companies) interested in escalating the solution to enhance their health Tele-assistance.
  • Work in the next phases of Alice: IA applicable to IoT wearables and home sensors to complete assistance coverage to elders.

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