Comment by ranabasheer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ranabasheer | Hacker News Reader

I developed a telephony agent service to help my aging parents, who aren't fluent in English, navigate their healthcare needs. My parents simply talk to the agent, which I call Maya, in their native language. Maya then understands their requests and handles the outgoing calls to various offices and providers in English. So far, it's been an invaluable resource for them, helping with three key tasks: Scheduling doctor's appointments across multiple insurance plans. Checking pharmacy readiness for medicine pickups. Arranging transportation (both medical and non-medical) through services like CalOptima and OC ACCESS. The system uses a straightforward tech stack on AWS, combining separate ASR, LLM, and TTS models. It's a pragmatic solution I built because I couldn't find an existing service that fit my specific requirements. It’s been so useful for my family that I'm starting to wonder if this could help others in similar situations. What do you think, Hacker News? Is there a broader need for a service like this? I'm looking for your honest and brutal feedback on whether I should pursue this full-time.

Note: due to lack of scaling resources, only messaging works for general public. if you would like to test voice, I am happy to add you to whitelisted phone numbers.

This obviously hasn't taken off on HN, but absolutely you should pursue it. This is a fantastic use of AI, and you've already done the leg work making it functional and building a concise "what is it" site that is very clear.

There are many non native speakers in many countries, this could very quickly become a great global service. Be careful with privacy and hosted data, especially medical.

Well done to you!

Thank you for your kind words. The task of managing health related appointments for aging parents, kids, and your spouse itself is a full time job for some. I was hoping to get a handle on this with a tool like this.

Here's some honest and brutal feedback:

First, this service is breaking enough European data privacy rules that you should seriously consider blocking European visitors altogether (who's your GDPR Data Protection Officer? How do I get in touch with them?). On that vein:

> We use enterprise-grade encryption for all data and follow strict privacy protocols. Your information is never sold or shared

No information on what those privacy protocols are, though. And unless you're self-hosting the entire stack, are you really sure you're not sharing my private information with, say, OpenAI?

At a more general level, speech recognition and LLM performance outside English ranges from "it's okay" to "bad". If you're offering a service in a language that you don't speak (and forgive me for doubting your ability to speak Korean, Vietnamese, Russian, Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, and several more), be prepared for things to go wrong in ways you cannot understand. And speaking of which, how big is your "support team"? You wouldn't write "team" to mean just a single person, right?

> During your conversation with the officer, Maya stays on the line taking detailed notes about next steps, required documents, deadlines, and contact information so nothing gets lost.

I hope you're checking that you're in a one-party consent state. I also hope you've accounted for the person saying "I do not consent to be recorded".

At an even more general level: the problem with this idea is that it's aimed at the "average" person, but everyone has different pain points and your app will probably break up in contact with them. I can imagine it works well for your family because you know them, but are you sure it will work with mine? And you're aiming it at a sector of the population that, by definition, is bad with technology. That's a tough sell.

Anything related to healthcare can be a minefield. I wouldn't walk in there unprepared.

The more I read about healthcare regulations, I feel like I should just keep it as a tool for my parents and family. It does seem like a minefield of potential penalties albeit set up for the right intention but it keeps small players out.

Honestly, the big play here is to partner with someone that has that knowledge already.

So, the other end of the spectrum, doctors offices, insurance agents, etc.

These people have to already make reminder calls/emails etc, and they can get the consents needed.

That said, you probably have a gap between what you are doing now and what they require, which you need a case study to fill in.

Great idea and good luck.

Before you open this up to the public you should prepare to be used as a potential spam vector and put some rate limits in place.

Assuming you are using something like twilio behind the scenes it can be very difficult to get yourself off a blacklist once you wind up on one.

Twilio will be a problem. Twilio no longer comprehends that there are non-advertising SMS applications. I used to use Twilio for something that just responded to incoming SMS messages. Then they changed their rules so that I had to register as an "ad campaign" and pay extra fees, even though I didn't do anything outbound.

Yeah i have had similar issues with them.

I agree, keeping the spam off the tool is the hardest part. I have put in place a whitelisting of phone numbers. But that will all be thwarted by a determined spammers.

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