Closer — a voice companion for people living alone

Two point seven million Italians over seventy-five live on their own. Most have a family that wants to be there and is not: work, children, three hours of motorway. What is missing is not love. It is the ordinary daily conversation. Closer is a voice companion configured to one specific person. Their family describes them in plain words, a profile is generated from it, and the companion, Iris in the demo, talks to that person about what they know best: a trade, a town before it changed, a football club followed for sixty years. Old age leaves little to say about today and a great deal about the past, and nobody asks any more. Closer asks, listens, and gives back one thing about how their world has changed since. It keeps a diary the person can correct out loud, remembers one thing from the last conversation, and gives the family a page they open with a key. Nothing is sent to anybody on its own, and it never interprets a health number: it writes down what was said and leaves the judgement to people. Built on the AssemblyAI Voice Agent API, with server-side tools so the same agent is ready for a phone line, Cloudflare Pages and D1 for the diary, and a set of conversation rules, each written after a spoken test. The live demo tells the judge who they are playing and what to try.