Cyrano

Inspiration

We started...

...with something fun: taking the characters from one popular show and creating a script with them in another show.

Family Guy moves into The West Wing INT. OVAL OFFICE - DAY

President Peter Griffin sits at the Resolute Desk, looking over some papers. His chief of staff, Lois Griffin, enters.

LOIS: Mr. President, we need to discuss the latest economic projections.

PETER (not looking up) Yeah, yeah, in a minute Lois. Did you see the new Drunken Clam girl? Total babe.

Lois rolls her eyes.

LOIS: Sir, the numbers show we're headed for a recession if we don't take action soon. We need a stimulus package.

PETER: A what package? Hehehehe. Stimulus.

LOIS: Please take this seriously! We're talking about people's lives here.

Peter's daughter Meg enters.

MEG: Dad, there's a situation brewing in the Middle East that requires your attention.

PETER: Not now, Meg.

Meg sighs and exits. Peter's advisor, Stewie Griffin, enters holding a folder.

STEWIE: Good lord, it's a madhouse today. Here are the poll numbers you requested. Your approval rating has slipped again.

PETER: Aw crap, this job is hard. Can't we just go get wasted at the Drunken Clam?

LOIS: Peter! You're the President!

PETER: Alright, fine. Let's focus on one thing at a time here people. Lois, get me a plan to fix the economy. Stewie, handle the Middle East stuff. And Meg - just go away.

They all nod and exit the Oval Office, leaving Peter alone again.

PETER: Being President sucks. Where's that new intern? She was smokin'.

Peter clicks on the intercom.

PETER: Hey new hot intern, come see me in the Oval Office. And bring some beer! Chop chop!

He leans back in his chair and grins.

END SCENE.

...next, we decided...

That was super funny, but we used it a dozen times and lost interest -- some scripts were good, some were dopey. It seems screenwriting requires some talent.

We added the criteria of creating something we wanted to do over and over and wouldn't get bored with, and since we had all just been comparing our New York Times Connections for the day, we decided to create a CONNECTIONS GENERATOR. Maybe generative AI was made for theme creation (only about 10% of the themes we came up with seemed compelling), but the presentment and solving of the puzzle was super clunky. Idea killed.

FINALLY ...someone suggested "let's do something that helps people be better at something important"

Our team has lots of members with aging parents and we are increasingly frustrated with the level of attention and support they get. Also, none of us are doctors. We wish we could have better discussions with our parents than "you should eat better!". And so, our project became Cyrano -- a whisper in the ear of caregivers. We tried to imagine how we might help a caregiver working with our parents (or even ourselves) elevate to a higher level.

What it does

Cyrano takes information about a patient -- diseases, recent measurements -- and builds a conversation for a caregiver to have to update their numbers, share some education, and maybe have a nice conversation about non-health.

How we built it

First we had to learn about prompt engineering. I think we went from absolute beginner to naive novice. The best impact was implementing changing the tone of the dialog and the literacy level. The least effective was generating images. In the top, with a prompt of "robot nurse" we randomly get images ranging from a robot wearing a nurse's hat (good), to what looks like a Japanese サラリーマン (salary man) talking into a mobile phone). We left it in.

Second was we had to figure out how the order of data entry impacted the conversation generation. For example, enter the date and then the patient record -- five minutes, but enter the patient record then the date -- two minutes.

Challenges we ran into

1. It is slow. Our real-time demo was 15 minutes long as we waited for all of the parts of the conversation to be generated.
2. We never figured out how to exert much image control.
3. The jokes ranged from pretty funny, e.g., Q: "What did the senior say when you asked them about Ace of Base?" (Ace of Base "I Saw the Sign" was the top song on this date 30 years ago". A: "I saw the sign that said it might be time to replace the battery in my hearing aid" to super dumb
4. We initially wanted to create a single dialog creation with questions about overdue measurements, an education piece, and other conversation starters. All together, the quality was inconsistent, so we had to break it up into conversation, education, chit chat to get a focused text request. Not too difficult, but it took a while to figure out.
5. For some data manipulation it took a while for us to figure out how to get "just the answer" and not a lesson in python coding or a detailed methodology.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We met our goals of crafting a great conversation in the tone, literacy level and language preference of the patient.

We also solved our persistency problem so that data carried between sessions and we offered up new education topics every time we had a conversation.

What we learned

The power of changing the literacy level alone (and secondly, the language) really showed the power of the generative AI. Also, the quality of health advice from the chatbot was very high (we asked a Certified Diabetes Educator to give it a test)

We also learned that maybe we laid a too complex problem over the top of this tool -- the clunky work arounds for persistency maybe mean we need to wait for external API access or use another tool.

What's next for Cyrano

1. We want to add a couple of more supported conditions
2. We need to rearrange some of the generation to try and speed it up
3. We may need to move on an outside source for the jokes.
4. We created a recipe recommender, but it didn't make much sense if we couldn't send it to the patient (no outside access yet). Same for an exercise routine.
5. When outside access is available, we want to use Polly for some text-to-voice so that if we call someone and get a voicemail we can just play the recording. This would increase a caregiver's ability to serve more people since they might be able to serve 20 voicemail patients in an hour instead of two live.

Built With

• partyrock