Saltlux Launches Dialect AI to Tackle Elderly Loneliness in Local Communities

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunseok Yoo]Saltlux has been selected as a finalist in the Ministry of the Interior and Safety's '2021 Resident Participation Digital-Based Local Community Field Problem Solving Contest' for the project 'Solving Loneliness Issues of Elderly Living Alone Using Residents' Talents.'

According to Saltlux on the 28th, this project is a digital regional innovation initiative that utilizes digital and scientific technologies to enable cooperation between local governments and the private sector to solve regional problems. Saltlux participated in the contest with Hummingbee, a technology-based content specialist company, Tongyeong City, and Donam Social Welfare Center, focusing on providing emotional support and social safety measures for elderly living alone in Tongyeong City. They succeeded in being selected as a recipient of the support project.

The core of the 'Solving Loneliness Issues of Elderly Living Alone Using Residents' Talents' project is the development of the care doll 'Tongyeong-type Jaru (JARU)' (hereafter 'Jaru'), which can communicate in the local dialect of Tongyeong City. Jaru is an IoT (Internet of Things)-based smart toy by Hummingbee, conceptualized as an emotional family for single-person households. Saltlux will focus on ▲audio data inspection and deep learning development ▲chatbot and counseling function development ▲AI platform development, implementing the Tongyeong dialect-based conversational system and AI-powered care functions for Jaru.

First, Saltlux will secure local dialect voice content from Tongyeong City resident activists, collect and refine it to build a corpus database for Tongyeong City's dialect. By integrating Saltlux AI Cloud’s AI technologies such as speech synthesis and speech recognition with the secured Tongyeong dialect voice resources, they plan to provide various care services for elderly living alone?including memory-based daily conversations and emergency situation detection and alerts?in the form of AIaaS (AI as a Service).

Saltlux has successfully carried out numerous language big data projects, including the 'Daily Conversation Corpus Construction' led by the National Institute of the Korean Language and the 'Korean Dialect AI Data Construction for AI Learning' led by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Information Society Agency. Additionally, they possess Asia’s largest corpus with 1 million language corpora and over 20,000 hours of voice data.

Tongyeong City is a super-aged society where the elderly population accounts for 20.18% of the total population, and the increase in elderly depression and solitary deaths has emerged as a serious social issue. The Tongyeong-type Jaru, which will be provided to 100 elderly living alone in Tongyeong City, is expected not only to solve emotional disconnection and loneliness among the elderly but also to contribute significantly to improving social care systems by addressing local issues through smart technology and contributing to social welfare.

Lee Kyung-il, CEO of Saltlux, said, "As Korea is undergoing rapid changes with an increase in single-person households and an aging society, it is very meaningful for Saltlux to contribute to helping marginalized vulnerable groups and solving social problems using AI technology." He added, "We will strive to become an AI company that contributes to solving various challenges faced by our society through continuous technology development and win-win cooperation."