AI California Homelessness
Ricardo Lezama  

An AI Bot For Homelessness and Substance Abuse

An encampment in San Bernardino, California

Substance Abuse and Homelessness are inextricably linked. Often times, the sad reality around homelessness involves heartache within families and individuals whose addictions have clouded their better judgment. This state of mind happens to also inhibit the ability to manage their housing situation with self esteem, hygiene and other basic experiences of an individual neglected in the pursuit of an addictive drug.

The Future Of Homelessness As Result Of Reduced Social Net

This upcoming year will bring many positive developments, like a more manageable pandemic, more measured consumption patterns and a bit more resilience on a population that has collectively gone through so many unprecedented events.

However, we should be mindful that 2023 will be the first truly unsubsidized year for many Americans since November 2019 began to disrupt business as usual. In 2023, Covid relief will be non-existent within many communities. Tax relief, which is often a type of savings for many Americans, will be more limited because of the removal of tax credits for childcare, electric car purchases or other somewhat work-related items that ease economic pain.

This implies that homelessness will continue its upward trend which in 2021, 2022 appeared uninfluenced by massive state and federal intervention.

Doing Our Part – Homeless Chatline

We’ve opened up a hotline using the Twilio Service. My collaborators, Natalia Rueda and Quetzalli Solis, have developed dialogues for attending to the potential needs of people experiencing homelessness.

Certain cities in Riverside County have a compassionate but also not enabling policy towards homelessness.

We used the following prompt in Chat GPT-3 and used the Google Cloud suite of tools to deploy our chatbot: The following is a conversation with an AI assistant. The assistant is helpful, creative, clever, and very friendly.

In this hotline, a person can ask basic questions about homelessness rules and resources available to them. Yes, homelessness is a state of affairs that is governed by laws/rules. People would do well to abide by these laws because they can receive help in a better manner through these rules.

The chatbot number is (951)-404-1863. You can text this bot basic questions about homelessness and chat bot.

Text the bot basic questions. There are some specific Riverside County recommendations.