1800 KATHY

1-800-KATHY is a mobile voice assistant that helps staff members at Disability Providers take notes at the end of their day.

Impact

Do you know someone with down syndrome or autism? When they graduated high school, they likely became a member of a Disability Provider- a nonprofit organization that provides residential and day care services. Since Disability Providers are backed by federal Medicaid ($84B industry!), they are DROWNED in paperwork- requiring all their staff members to take daily notes that prove services were effectively delivered to each member. Every note taken on a member requires a due diligence “review” stage, where managers determine if the note is good enough to be compliant.

1-800-KATHY is inspired by a woman named Kathy who used to call an actual 1-800 hotline in the 90’s to record her notes. A human would be on the other end, recording her notes, ensuring compliance was kept. 1-800-KATHY brings the convenience of that 90’s phone call with the power of real-time voice and o1’s reasoning. The beauty is that staff members can have a human-like conversation with AI with minimal latency, while a reasoning model can compare user input to millions of data points asynchronously. This will allow staff to take better notes faster and completely automate the manager review process.

1-800-KATHY is not literally a phone number: it’s a native mobile app that emulates a phone experience. We did this in order to have full control over the UI, while giving the staff members (who tend to be older and less technical) a nostalgic spin on AI. We made it mobile because staff are always on their feet! Staff members open the app, click a “Call Kathy” button, then converse with Kathy about their day, as if Kathy is a “super coach” that knows everything about the individuals and regulatory requirements.

Code and Theme Alignment

As of 2/16, 1-800-KATHY is a functional MVP that uses a react frontend, node.js backend, 4o-realtime to simulate “Kathy, the notetaker”, and o1-mini for reasoning. Think of 4o-realtime as “the blind notetaker” who’s just checking off the basic requirements of the daily questionnaire, which consists of dropdown, checklist, and paragraph fields. The real-time model then sends the staff member’s data to o1-mini to reason if the staff member’s input ACTUALLY complies with all the federal/state guidelines and internal PowerPoint training. Think of o1-mini as a personal lawyer that ensures notes are correctly articulated and compliant in near real-time.

The three of us all work for a startup called Kibu, who builds software for Disabilities Providers. This is the same customer who will be using 1-800-KATHY. While we didn’t start writing any code for 1-800-KATHY, the idea for it was always in the back of our heads. The theme for this Hackathon so perfectly aligned with the idea, that we couldn’t pass it up!