How it works

How Sophie works

Simple for residents, simple for staff. Here’s what happens from the day a resident is added to a normal day of talking to her.

What Sophie is

Sophie is a voice companion for an older person, in a care home or at home. She sits in the room on a small desk robot with a friendly face on screen, or on an iPad on a stand. The resident says “Sophie” or taps her face, and talks. Staff, or a family, see what happened in a web console. Sophie is the software, not the box: everything she knows about a resident lives on the server, so a replacement unit is the same Sophie.

Getting started, in four steps

1. Add the residentIn the Care Console: their name, room, what they like talking about and what to avoid, their diary and their reminders. This happens before any device exists.
2. Place the deviceA robot on the bedside table or an iPad on a stand. It needs Wi-Fi and a plug — no wiring, nothing installed in the room. In the console, you give it to the resident.
3. They talkThey say “Sophie” or tap her face. She greets them by name and takes it from there. There is no app for the resident to learn.
4. Your team reads itConversations, help requests, medication and mood trends, all in the console in a browser. Nothing to install.

A day with Sophie

Company

She talks and listens in plain, warm language, remembers what she’s told and asks gentle questions. What she knows comes from that resident’s own profile, so she isn’t inventing a life story; if she doesn’t know, she says so.

“What’s on today?”

Answered from a diary the staff keep. Reminders arrive at the right time, in her own words.

Medication, and whether it landed

She prompts, then asks. Taken, refused, unclear or no reply — each is recorded against the resident, so the console can answer “did she take her tablets?” rather than only “we reminded her”.

Asking for help

If a resident says they need help, Sophie raises an alert in the console with the exact words that caused it. Anything ambiguous is confirmed first, and a television talking about somebody else doesn’t raise anything.

Calls with family

A resident can ask Sophie to ring someone on their approved list, and an approved relative can ring the room from the free Sophie Family app on iPhone or Android. This is the newest part of Sophie and hasn’t yet been used in a care-home pilot.

What the staff see

One web console behind a login. A care home is set up with its own residents and staff, and three roles keep it tidy: a manager runs the home, a carer does the day-to-day, and nobody sees another home’s residents. A manager sees Dashboard, Conversations, Alerts, Wellbeing, Medication, “Worth a look”, Patients, Devices, Staff and My account.

• Every conversation, with what Sophie answered from.
• Alerts that carry the words that raised them and are cleared by a named person.
• Mood over time, sampled from how someone speaks, with the sample count shown so a thin week isn’t mistaken for a trend.
• “Worth a look”: eight plain counting rules over what’s already recorded — stopped talking, mood sliding, prompts going unanswered, a device off the air. Each line links to its evidence. Not a diagnosis.

What happens behind the scenes

• Her name is recognised on the device. Nothing leaves the room until someone says “Sophie” or taps her face.
• Speech is turned into text on our own server (or on the iPad itself, on iPads that support it), not by a big-tech voice assistant.
• Every reply is checked before it’s spoken. If she’s about to claim she saw something, invent a relative, say help is coming when it isn’t, or give medical advice, the answer is replaced with an honest one.
• Devices update themselves, unattended and never mid-conversation, and a device that goes quiet shows up in the console.
• She stands on her own. Sophie has her own server and database. The only outside service is the language model behind free conversation, which a customer can point at their own provider.

Robot or iPad

The robot is a small desk unit with an animated face that lip-syncs as she talks. We set it up and bring it; it boots straight into Sophie and stays locked to her. The iPad runs the free Sophie app: the care home sets it up from the console with a one-time code in a couple of minutes, no visit needed. Setting Sophie up on an iPad.

Questions about privacy, the camera and who Sophie is for are answered in the FAQ.