I've spent close to thirty years writing software. The day OpenAI shipped their first realtime voice API, I sat down to build a voice product. I had several ideas. Then I thought about my parents.
They're getting older. Yours probably are too. There is one population scammers spend more time and money trying to fool than any other — and it is overwhelmingly the people who raised us. They prey on what makes our parents who they are: politeness, the urge to help, the instinct to pick up when the phone rings.
Last year, Americans lost over $25 billion to phone scams. The average elder fraud victim — someone over 60 — lost $83,000. Those aren't abstract numbers. They're our parents, our grandparents, our aunts and uncles, the older neighbor we check on.
Clara is the assistant I wanted on my mother's phone. Patient. Polite. Endlessly suspicious of strangers asking for gift cards. The kind of help I'd want for myself one day, too. I'm hoping she can be on your family's phones as well.