EarCaster

Earcaster is a voice companion for people with dementia, built for my great-aunt, who has Alzheimer's and asks the same questions every day: what day is it, when is my family coming, did I take my pill. The Android app listens on her phone and answers in a calm voice. During the hackathon I connected it to Meta's Muse Spark so it can answer the questions nobody predicted. The problem with a normal chatbot is that a person with dementia cannot tell an invented visit from a real one. So every sentence Muse Spark writes is checked in code before it is spoken: it is dropped if it tells her to take a medication, and replaced by "I don't have that written down" if it names a day, time, date, person or place that is not in her caregiver's profile, the shared family calendar or today's logged doses. For the family who cares for her, Muse Spark also writes a daily summary, turns a WhatsApp message like "I'll be there Sunday at 5" into a calendar change that the caregiver approves, prepares a brief for relatives before a visit, and warns when a new worry starts repeating. In every feature the model writes and the code counts, traces and decides. Audio never leaves the phone and phone numbers are never sent to Meta.