Skylark Vision

A machine can remind you to take your medicine. But can it also become the closest thing to family? There is something deeply unsettling about the age we are entering. We have built machines that can speak, listen, monitor our health, and respond to our emotions. We can ask artificial intelligence to summarize our meetings, write our emails, and answer our questions in seconds. Technology keeps becoming more efficient, more helpful, more intimate. And yet, in many parts of the world, human beings are growing old in unbearable silence. In South Korea, one response to that silence has arrived in the form of a soft AI companion doll named Hyodol . It is not metallic or futuristic in the dramatic way science fiction once imagined. It is small, plush, childlike, and warm in appearance. It talks to elderly users in a cheerful voice, reminds them to eat and take medicine, asks how they are feeling, and alerts caregivers if something seems wrong. On paper, it sounds like a clever elderc...