An AI-Powered Chatbot Designed to Help Homeless People

Imagine this for a moment: You have no job. Your savings are rapidly depleting. You have no friends or family to help you pay the rent. It’s only a matter of time before the owner kicks you out of the house. When that happens, what’s your next move? Where will you find help, or at least free food to get you through that day? Fortunately, an app was designed just for those kinds of questions.

Built by the Toronto-based startup Ample Labs, the chatbot, called Chalmers, helps quickly direct struggling local users to free meals, shelter, and other resources. The early version is simple, but the app will eventually be able to respond to detailed questions.
[...]
The team spent months working with people experiencing homelessness, along with frontline staff at agencies and shelters, to develop the new app. A chatbot made sense, Chen says, because it directs people to information quickly and because most people who need help do have smartphones. “When we went into shelters and did codesign and [testing], we also found that people are more likely to tell personal information to a bot,” she says.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Mark Bone/ Ample Labs)


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That said, any program that requires poor people to go online is setting them up for failure. A now-defunct work requirement to receive Medicaid in Arkansas required participants to report work hours online to a portal that wasn't even open 24 hours. In a state where a big chunk of people have no internet access at all.
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A lot of people are WiFi only, which is available in cities. Phones are handed down. Half the people I know use fairly obsolete phones that were given to them. I use the same phone I got more than ten years ago. And have you been to a library lately? They are full of people using computers there because they don't have one.
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