Voice is everywhere, let's realize its potential!
Making the case for voice-AI for caregiving
Over my 25+ year career, I’ve visited hundreds of patients’ homes and there’s only been one constant—voices in the background. They’ve come from TVs, radios, computers streaming Netflix or YouTube and covered an enormous variety of subjects.
The voices sing songs, repeat well worn lines from ‘70s reruns, explain how to cook or conquer technology. More recently, they’re from a Zoom or Meet call waiting for me and the patient to connect by video for an online visit with a loved one.
And it hasn’t just been home visits. I spent a significant part of my career as a hospitalist where, once again, TVs provided background sounds and voices as we provided care. I could piece together whole episodes of popular shows during my mid-afternoon rounds!
The lesson from this is clear but often missed: People use background voices and sounds to care for themselves as they practice self-care. Voice provides company … it entertains, educates, inspires and even, at times, confounds, but it is almost always present.
There is massive—yet untapped—potential to leverage the power of voice to care for others using proactive voice-AI agents (PVAIs) with humans-at-the-helm.
Today’s voice-AI agents like Siri and Alexa are used for narrow tasks and only usable by some for self-care. We can do so much more with voice!
The power of personalized, proactive voice
By creating personalized content, we can expand the self-care model to a shared caregiving model where caregiving teams can use it for a proactive, 24/7 connection with their care recipients.
Imagine the following scenario: A 45-year-old woman is trying to take care of her 85-year-old mother who lives 3 states away. Last Christmas she gave her mom SiriusXM radio for the news and ‘50s stations.
Her mom now listens all the time. Lately though, she’s forgotten several of her medical and social appointments and her daughter’s reminder calls often go to voicemail.
Daughter - Let’s sneak some reminders into your day between Johnny Mathis songs, ok?
Mom - Ok, as long as it doesn’t interrupt the best parts!
Daughter - I promise. This way you can easily let me know that you’ll go to your appointments.
Mom - It’s a deal!
This scenario isn’t far-fetched at all.
Voice can now be and should be leveraged to help us care for those who can’t care for themselves!
PVAIs with humans-at-the-helm will finally help us realize the vast potential to use voice-AI and conversational-AI to help both caregivers and care recipients.
Great question, fortunately, not as difficult as one might think given user (vs. host) control.
Proactive, voice dialogs can be configured by caregivers at PVAI setup as they are generally (1) reminders, (2) check-ins or (3) offers to engage with content: eg, Don't forget to take your new meds! How are you feeling today? or Would you like to listen to music or play scrabble?. Caregivers can also configure how the PVAI will respond and, if/when needed, "act" based on responses of the care recipient (eg, notify the CG via text if the CR says "I feel horrible!").
As providers of PVAIs and numbers of CG and CR users scale, they'll have multiple options -- both automated options managed by the PVAI based on historical data and options managed by CGs (or their human proxies) asynchronously or in real-time.
Reactive, voice-AI dialogs with CRs will operate as they do now with all voice-AI agents, although our vision is that CGs will be able to set guardrails as suggested in today's NYT op-ed about the movie Her!
Couldn't agree more. Your 'humans-at-the-helm' for 24/7 proactive voice AI is so insightful. How do you envision that constant oversight scaling, especialy? A real systems design puzzle.