Benefit Bridge

After job loss, Benefit Bridge helps people organize next steps and find official assistance through an Alexa+-style conversation. Alexa+ integration is proposed; this demo is a web simulator.

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Inspiration

Losing a job can quickly create financial stress. At the same time, finding help may require people to navigate multiple agencies, unfamiliar terms, and separate websites. We wanted to explore how a conversational assistant could make those next steps easier to discover and understand.

What it does

BenefitBridge demonstrates a guided benefits-navigation experience for a fictional Kansas household. A person can share basic household circumstances and needs, then receive a suggested recovery plan with direct links to official resources for programs such as unemployment insurance, SNAP, KanCare, and energy assistance.

The goal is to help people organize where to start—not to determine eligibility, submit applications, or replace government agencies. The relevant agencies make all eligibility and benefit decisions.

How Alexa+ could help

In the intended Alexa+ experience, someone could talk through a difficult situation naturally, answer follow-up questions, and ask for unfamiliar terms or next steps to be explained in plain language. Alexa+ could act like a patient personal service guide: helping organize priorities, surface relevant official resources, and make the process more convenient and less overwhelming, including for people who prefer voice interaction.

How we built it

We built a browser-based simulator to demonstrate the guided conversation and personalized plan, and deployed the web application on AWS. The project also includes a separate self-hosted MCP service. The simulator does not currently connect to that service or to an Alexa+ device; Alexa+ integration is the proposed direction shown in the demo, not a live feature.

Challenges and what we learned

A key challenge was making the experience useful without implying that it can approve benefits or replace agency guidance. We focused on presenting suggestions as informational, linking directly to official Kansas resources, and using fictional household information in the demonstration. We also learned that clear language and a well-organized next-step plan can matter as much as finding a program: people need to understand what to explore and where to go next.## Inspiration

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