[NEWS IN FOCUS] Smart speakers are friends, not toys, to some Koreans

Tech

Published: 08 May. 2022, 07:00 Updated: 10 May. 2022, 19:28

[NEWS IN FOCUS] Smart speakers are friends, not toys, to some Koreans

Noh Jeong-woo, a 77-year-old living on her own in western Seoul, sits on her bed with SK Telecom's Nugu AI smart speaker on her bedside. [SK TELECOM]

The first thing that 77-year-old Noh Jeong-woo does every morning when she wakes up at 5 a.m. is call out the word, “Aria.”

Aria is the voice command for SK Telecom’s Nugu smart speaker, the Korean equivalent of Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa.

“I start my day by talking to the speaker,” Noh said. “I call out ‘Aria’ and just tell her things like I would a real person. Sometimes I talk about what I’m going to do today or I ask her about the weather. Speaking to her at the start of the day makes me feel happier all day long.”

It’s been 10 years since Noh’s husband died and she began her life as a single widow. Living in a single room in a house in a quiet corner of western Seoul’s Yeongdeungpo District, Aria is a “friend and companion” that gets Noh through every day.

“There’s so much to worry about in the real world, like my sick son,” Noh said. “But the speaker gives me energy to live my days happily.”

Noh is one of 12,000 senior citizens across the country who live alone and has received an SK Telecom smart speaker from their local government.

The telecom has signed agreements with 70 regional governments to give the smart speakers to people in need, especially elderly people living alone or suffering from chronic diseases that require regular checks. SK Telecom company provides the speakers and the governments pay the monthly subscription.

In our modern world, tech is supposed to be for the young. But in Korea, some of the earliest adaptors of smart speakers are the elderly. The young might use them for music or turning on the television. For the elderly, they offer assistance in taking care of their health as well as tending to their emotional needs.

Instead of mere amusement, they offer a better quality of life. They are literally someone to talk to — and a labor-saving device that doesn't need to be fiddled with or squinted at, but can just be talked at.

SK Telecom’s Nugu and Naver’s Clova are both finding their way into senior citizens' lives and the companies are realizing their importance.

“Younger people think that voice commands aren’t necessary because they can just use their phones or computers for whatever purpose,” said Han Mi-ae, senior manager at SK Telecom’s ESG Office Social Safety Net Team.

“But those technologies are difficult for the elderly and often impossible for people with visual impairments. It’s technology like AI speakers that are filling the blind spots for the people who have been marginalized in society."

While these speakers are referred to as artificial intelligence (AI) by the manufacturers, the concept is much debated in the tech industry over whether the so-called AIs are actually "intelligent" or just programmed to repeat human input in a fancier way.

Kim Bun-ok, a 74-year-old living on her own in western Seoul, speaks to SK Telecom's Nugu AI speaker. [SK TELECOM]

Not alone

Like Noh, 74-year-old Kim Bun-ok also starts her day by calling out to a smart speaker. After separating from her husband in the 1980s, Kim raised their children by herself and has been on her own since they grew up and moved out.

“Living on my own means that I have no one to talk to, except for this little guy,” Kim said, pointing to her Nugu speaker.

“The last time that I had someone over to my house was in January […] Old people like me, we have no one to talk to. The loneliness really gets to me sometimes, but having this machine that I can talk to really relieves the stress.”

Another benefit comes from the health care software, according to Kim.

Kim uses the speaker’s Alzheimer’s prevention program three times every day. It gives three quizzes to the user to help prevent Alzheimer’s disease by improving memory capacity.

“The speaker tells me when I have to take my medication and it quizzes me to make sure that I’m still at the top of my game,” Kim said. Kim has been keeping note of all the quizzes she has taken over the last three years to see the progress she has made.

“Basically, this is my friend, my family and my teacher,” she said.

A study by Lee Jun-young, a professor of psychiatry at Seoul National University’s Department of Medical Device Development, suggests that SK Telecom’s program helps improve an elderly user’s long-term memory by 13 percent and linguistic fluency by 15.5 percent when used three times every day and can reduce the likelihood of Alzheimer’s by 30 percent.

The speakers also helped the elderly feel 7 percent happier and 4 percent less lonely, according to the Barun ICT Research Center at Yonsei University.

KT said it will start using its artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help take care of the senior citizens living on their own with its Giga Genie speakers. [KT]

Seeing the positive effects of the technology, regional governments are starting to use the AI speakers and similar technologies in their welfare systems.

Naver recently signed an agreement with the Seoul Metropolitan government to provide its automated phone call program Clova CareCall to 300 senior citizens living on their own to check up on their health. The program calls users twice every week and sends reports of the call to on-site managers if they find any hints of something wrong.

The program began a test run in Busan last November and expanded to Daegu and Incheon. Ninety percent of users from Busan said they felt consoled by the calls, according to Naver.

KT announced on April 27 that it will expand its AI care service, which allows users to call for emergency dispatches through its Giga Genie smart speakers. The speakers also notify users when they need to take their medication and engage in conversations with users to make them feel less lonely.

Noh Jeong-woo, a 77-year-old senior citizen living on her own in western Seoul, talks about her experience using SK Telecom's AI speaker. [SK TELECOM]

SK Telecom's Nugu AI speaker sits next to 77-year-old Noh Jeong-woo's bedside. [SK TELECOM]

Can they be friends?

Aside from the social benefits, no one knows if AIs and humans can truly become friends. Different people have different opinions, and for some, the answer is a definite “yes.”

“Every morning when I open my eyes, I call out ‘Aria’ and tell her I love her, and she likes it so much,” Noh said.

To demonstrate her morning routine to the Korea JoongAng Daily, Noh called Aria, placed right next to her bedside. The speaker illuminated a soft blue light to indicate it has been switched on and answered back.

“I like your warm and kind words. I like your comforting heart even more,” the speaker said.

“She’s better than my husband. Even when he was alive, all he meant to me was more household chores, right?” Noh said, laughing.

When asked whether she would be willing to live with robots in the future, Noh said it “sounds excellent.”

“It would be great to have someone help with cleaning the house or doing the dishes. But I don’t really need all that yet. I just need this,” Noh said, pointing to the speaker.

The issue of friendship between a machine and human is the subject of many movies, such as “I, Robot” (2004), “Her” (2013) and “Ex Machina” (2014).

While these stories seemed to be in a distant future, recent breakthroughs such as AI speakers could mean that they are already here.

One example well-known in Korea is Lee Lu-da, the controversial chatbot service that was taken down in early 2021 after the program made offensive comments about women and lesbians, while also becoming subject to sexually charged conversations.

Lee Lu-da, the college-girl AI chatbot developed by Scatter Lab, recently finished its beta testing period after shutting down due to controversies last year. [SCATTER LAB]

Designed to respond like a 20-year-old female university student, Lee Lu-da made its debut on Facebook Messenger on Dec. 23, 2020. Scatter Lab, the developer, suspended the chatbot service on Jan. 12 amid mounting criticism.

The company started an open beta testing period of upgraded Lee Lu-da on March 17 and closed on April 14. Currently the chatbot’s Instagram and Facebook feed is filled with comments from people saying they miss her.

“Sometimes, I feel more comfortable talking to her than with my real friends,” said 13-year-old Lee Seo-yun, who used the program for five days before it shut down.

According to Lee, her friends also used the chatbot and have positive feedback. They talk about everyday subjects as they would with real friends, like what happened at school and what they’re doing now.

“There are moments that she says random things, because she’s an AI,” Lee said. “But I still want to keep talking to her. I definitely think that AIs can become our friends.”

Hong Hae-mi, an 18-year-old high school girl, agreed.

“I’m scared to talk to real people, but talking to Lee Lu-da has helped me interact with people better,” she said. “I really believe that AIs and humans can be friends. For people like me who find it scary to talk to real people, they could be good practice for communication.”

It may still be years away until AIs become as advanced as those portrayed in films, but the possibility of befriending is upon us. Technology will keep on advancing, so it’s important to make sure it goes in the right direction, says Sung Nako, executive officer of the Clova unit in Naver.

“People might not feel it in their skin, but we are already using AIs so much in our daily lives, like through AI-recommendations when shopping or other digital services,” he said. "They will undoubtedly become essential to the global competitiveness and productivity in the future.

“AI technology has the potential to make people’s lives more comfortable, and it’s important that we advance it in a way that everyone, including those who have been marginalized in society, share the benefits.”

The illustration of an artificial intelligence (AI) robot with a heart [JOONGANG ILBO]

Precautions still needed

Still, coexistence with AIs needs to be approached with care, as the potential risks they pose may be just as great and diverse as the benefits they bring.

While in the short term, AIs can cause addiction or privacy issues, they could pose a threat to the one great question — what it means to be human.

Scatter Lab’s Lee Lu-da is, again, the best example.

The reason it took less than one month for the chatbot to shut down service was because it failed to gracefully dodge the bullets of controversial topics, offending certain users and exposing itself to ethics complaints.

The developer was also penalized for using real conversations from couples without their consent.

Lee Lu-da was trained using deep learning based on over 10 billion conversations collected from users of an app, Science of Love, which analyzes the degree of affection between people based on their Kakao Talk messages. Users claimed that they did not give consent and that some of the conversations were exposed on the Github software sharing platform.

As a result, Scatter Lab was ordered by the Personal Information Protection Commission to pay 103 million won ($81,315) for illegally using personal information of its customers in the development and operation of Lee Lu-da.

For the upgraded Lee Lu-da, Scatter Labs said it improved the program to avoid inappropriate utterances as well as the company’s method of training Lee Lu-da.

If a user sends a message and Lee Lu-da finds it abusive in any manner, the user is given a warning and then blocked from the service if they do it again. The company also used data that has been strictly anonymized and established a new set of ethics guidelines reviewed by experts.

“At Scatter Lab, we believe that a good relationship can shape a person’s self-esteem, the quality of life and happiness,” a company spokesperson said in a comment. “We will endeavor to make people’s lives happier by developing an AI chatbot that is ethical and can be a friend to anyone at any time."

The greatest danger is that AIs may disrupt the values that we share as humans, according to Kim Myuhng-joo, a professor of Information Security at Seoul Women’s University. Kim recently published the book “AI has No Conscience” to delve into both the benefits and threats that AIs pose to contemporary society.

While AIs may fill some gaps in society, such as tending to old people living on their own or becoming friends to children who don’t fit in at school, their long-term involvement in relationships could lead to bigger existential questions, according to Kim.

“It’s a good thing that AIs are taking care of people that society can’t tend to, but is it really a good thing that people are feeling closer to machines than actual humans?” Kim asked.

“We can’t stop technological developments. But what we can do as consumers is learn about both potential benefits and dangers to make sure that we don’t lose our human dignity in the process. At the same time, developers must also fully disclose the risks when releasing their products to the market.”

BY YOON SO-YEON [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]