Bucheon-si Utilizes Naver 'Clova Care Call' to Identify At-Risk Households... AI Phone Counseling for 9,000 Households

Bucheon City in Gyeonggi Province announced on the 14th that it has signed a business agreement with Naver Cloud Corp. to establish a 'Crisis Household Discovery Cooperation System' utilizing super-large artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

According to the agreement, the city plans to operate a crisis household counseling system using 'Clova Care Call' developed by Naver Cloud. Clova Care Call is an AI phone service applied with Naver's super-large-scale AI, HyperCLOVA, which, unlike existing services that ask short-answer questions, can remember the context of conversations and engage in natural, human-like dialogue.

The city will proactively verify crisis status and overall living conditions through AI telephone counseling to classify those who genuinely need assistance. Subsequently, public officials will conduct additional counseling to support linkage to welfare services.

The city plans to conduct AI telephone counseling targeting approximately 9,000 households. Starting this month, the project will be piloted in three neighborhoods: Simgok 2-dong, Sosabon-dong, and Seonggok-dong, and then expanded to all 37 neighborhoods next month.

Mayor Jo Yong-ik of Bucheon (right) and Naver Cloud Leader Ok Sang-hoon are posing for a commemorative photo after signing a business agreement on May 10 to establish a cooperative system for identifying vulnerable households using artificial intelligence (AI). 2024.5.10 [Photo by Bucheon City]

The Ministry of Health and Welfare is enhancing the welfare blind spot discovery system by expanding the collection of information not only on power and water outages and arrears but also on diseases and debts, and notifying local governments of crisis household candidates.

The number of individuals identified with crisis information has been rapidly increasing every year, and Bucheon City received notifications for more than 11,000 individuals last year. However, the process of re-verifying crisis information by local governments takes considerable time and leads to workload overload for staff, raising concerns about the qualitative decline in citizen welfare services.

To address these issues, Bucheon City has been cooperating with the Ministry of the Interior and Safety and Naver to discover crisis households using Clova Care Call.

Jo Yong-ik, Mayor of Bucheon City, stated, "Among the notified crisis information verification targets, we can screen out more than 30% of individuals who do not require assistance, which is expected to provide more substantial welfare services. We will continue to strive to quickly identify and support crisis households through a smart welfare system utilizing advanced technology and to improve the quality of welfare services."