Careline

Careline is a phone companion that is accessible 24/7. You can call Careline and talk with a personalised companion. You can talk openly about life, play games, and get mentorship.

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Inspiration

I left my home country of Iran when I was 16 and I have not seen my grandmother since then. Personally, I have learned so much from her and respected the values she has instilled in me. However, she is living a lonely life without much social interaction. About 1 in 6 Americans are 65 or older. Senior citizens are like treasure troves of knowledge and wisdom. But it's a shame that society often sees them as dead weight, totally underestimating their value. Many seniors end up living lonely and sad lives, struggling to connect with others.

What it does

I have developed a phone companion named Grace. Grace is accessible 24/7 and connected with ChatGPT. Grace is able to play a variety of games including Trivia, 2 truths and a lie, or storytelling challenge.

How we built it

I started by creating strong prompts on ChatGPT to make sure Grace has full context of how the conversations should go. I then connected ChatGPT with two functions that are deployed on Twilio using OpenAI API. One function does the voice to text and text to voice processing(using AWS services) and the other function communicated with the Open AI API. The responses from Open AI are fed into the first function and sent to Twilio API to be vocalised on the call.

Challenges we ran into

Getting used to the Twilio syntax took a bit of time. There are many mistakes we made by using the wrong service or not knowing how exactly a verb worked on Twilio. The error handling took hours as well. You need to take into account every possible way that something could go wrong or the conversation could get side tracked. Testing was slow at times since every time we had to call a number and wait until the middle of the conversation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to improve the latency and add filler words that make the conversation more natural. When OpenAI API is at its peak speed, Grace seems to have the same pace any other human would have.

What we learned

There is so much room to improve this solution. From specific prompt engineering to allowing users to make accounts and have their conversations be remembered. We are targeting an underserved market and feel fortunate to keep building.

What's next for Careline

We want to create accounts based on phone numbers, remember the conversation history, and make a dashboard for caregivers to know the progress their loved one is making. We then want to add specialised support for dementia/alzheimers prevention.

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