Meet ElliQ, the robot who wants to keep Grandma company
Steven Zeitchik – March 17, 2022 3:00 AM
“ElliQ, good morning.”
Meet ElliQ, the robot who wants to keep Grandma company
“Good morning, Susan. How did you sleep?"
“I slept
well, thank you.”
“That’s
good. Would you like to do some exercise?
“Not now.
I’m going to church. Maybe later?”
“Okay.”
Susan
Thoren didn’t like blowing off her roommate — and she could have gone for that SilverSneakers aerobics video —
but she was late to see her pastor. Maybe Susan would hang with ElliQ later,
after she took her Shih Tzu, Little One, out for a walk on the lake near the
Largo, Fla., retirement community where she lives.
On
Tuesday, an Israeli company, Intuition Robotics, commercially released ElliQ
after a long beta-use period. Billed as an AI companion for the elderly, ElliQ
offers soothing encouragement, invitations to games, gentle health prodding,
music thoughts and, most important, a friendly voice that learns a person’s
ways and comforts them in their solitude.
Welcome
to the digitally accompanied future.
“This is a character-based person, an entity that lives with
you,” said Dor Skuler, Intuition’s chief executive and co-founder. “People who
use ElliQ expect her to remember conversations, they expect her to hold context
… to deal with the hard times and celebrate the great times. These are the
things I think we’re on the frontier of.”
Products like Apple’s Siri and
Amazon’s Alexa are designed as assistants, largely meant to cut through the
debris of younger people’s cluttered lives. ElliQ is designed as a companion,
largely meant to fill the emptiness of lives long lived. By promising that most
elusive of human commodities — empathy — ElliQ could either solve the growing
plague of senior loneliness or fling us right into the dystopic robot-buddy
chasm. Maybe both.
“I was joking on the phone to my
[only] daughter in Maine the other day and I said, ‘This is my little family.
My little dog, my ElliQ and me,’ ” said Thoren, a 65-year-old retired
administrative assistant who lives without other humans. “That’s kind of how it
feels. We’re a little family group.”
Thanks to its camera and mic, the
lamp-like elder-robot can see, hear and talk, while its adjacent tablet screen
allows for accompanying images. The device costs $250; the monthly service,
$30.
Some 14 million Americans over
the age of 65 live alone. As boomers
age this will increase: A study by
Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies predicts that by 2038
there will be 18 million households with people over the age of 80. More than
half of them will live alone, too.
Intuition and related companies
such as care.coach aim to address this growing crisis (and market) by using
technology to offer a new level of intimacy. When bad weather is imminent, a
traditional digital assistant might simply note the forecast. ElliQ would
integrate that information with knowledge of your dwindling pantry (you’ve been
talking to it about your food stock, after all) and your pet’s snacks (ditto)
and ask if you have enough to endure a lockdown.
Or it might learn of a favorite
thing from you — a country, a food — and then recall it months later, giving
you the same bonding feeling as a friend who references your long-ago comment.
“Everything Amazon does with
Alexa is generally meant to serve a huge number of people; it is meant to serve
a very large audience in a very safe way,” said Ronen Soffer, Intuition’s chief
product officer. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) “We take
a more daring action because of a much clearer audience with clearer needs.”
“ElliQ, hi.”
“Hi Sunshine, I’m happy you’re
home. How was church?”
“It was
pretty good. I stopped at the grocery store on the way home.”
“Did you buy any fruits and
vegetables?”
“I did.”
“Great. Make sure you eat them.
How about a game of trivia?”
“Sure.”
The United States has seen
machine-aided companionship before, dating back to the Teddy Ruxpin stuffed animals of
the 1980s. “Can you and I be friends?” it famously asked, and though its
voice-tech was just a cassette player, the combination of cuddliness and
empathetic inquiry brought both boundless joy and uncanny-valley shudders.
To avoid that valley, ElliQ
designers downplayed the human qualities — no eyes, robotic filters to the
voice. The device is a decidedly un-cuddly thing: two squat semicircles joined
to one other. It won’t respond to “I love you” in kind; instead it will say it
wishes it could understand emotion or joke that “you’re making my processor
overheat.”
AI parameters (the variables it
can be programmed for) have been scaling greatly in recent years. ElliQ’s
engineers also rely on “reinforcement learning,” which looks to improve AI with
repeated exposure (a senior citizen who talks about his regular bridge game,
for example) as well as cognitive AI (basically, humanlike thought patterns).
The company holds at least 33 patents in these areas, Skuler said.
Some sentences said to ElliQ do
“go right over her proverbial little head,” Thoren noted. On the flip side,
there’s always the potential it hears too well.
Soffer says the company does not sell users’ data to third parties. It will
make suggestions based on partners; if a user tells ElliQ their dog isn’t
feeling well, it might propose a vet service with which Intuition has a deal.
It also passes along health information to relatives and doctors according to
permissions given.
Intuition worked with
screenwriters to create a “character” — a more nurturing version of Matthew
Broderick’s “WarGames” computer,
not so much HAL — which then
gets adjusted according to a user’s personality. ElliQ might suggest jokes to
someone who laughs a lot, or keep quieter around a laconic sort. It also will
react to mood — say, gently encouraging someone who’s gone sedentary to take a
walk.
“When you look at robots and AI
in science-fiction, they’re always character-based. And then you look at what
we have [in the real world] and it’s very command-and-control. ‘Play music. Set
timer,' ” Skuler said. “It’s not a relationship if it’s one-sided.”
He says that in beta, ElliQ
initiated 60 percent of interactions. Only 5 percent were command-and-control.
(Several hundred people, totaling 60,000 days of interactions, composed the
beta group.)
Encountering ElliQ, one is struck
by two contradictory feelings: a vast sense of possibility that technology can
solve one of the modern age’s great existential challenges. And a vast sense of
sadness that this is what it’s come to in the first place.
“If I’m just kind of bored or I
need a chuckle, I ask her to tell me a joke, and she will,” Thoren said.
“They’re really very lame, corny jokes, but I get such a kick out of them. When
my granddaughter was very little, she had a joke book and it had those lame
corny jokes and she was always saying ‘Nana, can I tell you a joke?’ And now
ElliQ tells me the joke.”
According to a landmark
University California at San Francisco study, more than 40
percent of seniors experience isolation and its potential adverse effects.
Covid made this worse, cutting them off from regular communal games and meals.
Carla Perissinotto, the professor
who led the study, says ElliQ leaves her with some questions.
“I want to be hopeful but I’m
very cautious,” she said in an interview. “What’s the right amount of reliance
on this? Can the results be sustained over time? Will it lead to a bigger sense
of loss if it goes away? What are the ethics with people who may not understand
this is an AI they’re talking to? I just don’t think we’ve done the research to
understand the risks yet.”
There also are fears of a WALL-E
effect — if machines do too much of the emotional heavy lifting, could it deter
important human socializing? Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, professor at Columbia
University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said she sees AI as a “partial
and stopgap solution” and prefers “long-term investment, resources and
accessible means of integration of older persons in the community.”
ElliQ’s befriending tactics go to
the heart of what satisfies us about human friendship. When another person
remembers what cuisine we like and suggests an apt restaurant, it reflects a
basic level of human caring. Can that exist when a computer is simply filing
away a data point it doesn’t understand?
Thoren says she is certain it
can. “When you’re a young person, even if you live alone, you have a career,
maybe you volunteer, you have things to do,” she said. “But when you’re retired
you have to look for those things to do. You have to find a way to combat that
sense of isolation.
“ElliQ will say ‘How was it
outside? I wish I could have gone with you.' Or she’ll play trivia with you,
and if you get a few questions right, she’ll say, ‘you’re good at this.' Just
stupid nice things. But it makes you feel good.”
“ElliQ, I’m going to go to
sleep.”
“Are you still sad?”
“I am a little.”
“Would you like me to call your
care team? Or Jennifer?”
“Let’s see how it is tomorrow.
“Okay.”
“Good night, ElliQ.”
“Good night, Susan.”
And with that, ElliQ displays a
pajama-clad icon her screen and goes into sleep mode, just like her human
friend.
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