Overview: 

250,000 live alone in Stockholm, many of who live in unwanted loneliness. This has a

profound impact on their mental health, and might lead to depression, accelerated early

stage dementia, and even suicide. We wanted to help one of Sweden’s largest energy

suppliers, Stockholm Exergi, to change this situation, and to “Make Stockholm Warmer, For

Everyone”.

After 2 years of research on Natural Language Understanding, we created the world’s first

tool and innovation to collect and save stories via smart speakers – The Memory Lane. It’s an

artificial intelligence innovation that will contribute to making society more socially

sustainable and inclusive. We installed the voice assistants in participants’ homes and it

instantly sparked self-perpetuating, personal conversations.

Memory Lane has resulted in podcast series, where our voice assistant has conversations

with people that share their life stories and memories. These conversations also generated

physical books, co-authored by artificial intelligence and the participants of the project.

Idea:

Millions live in unwanted loneliness, with very little or no interaction with family or friends.

Still, many of them have incredible life stories to tell, but no one to share them with.

Many independent scientific studies show that unwanted loneliness is as dangerous as

smoking or alcohol, and can rapidly trigger early stage dementia, depression and lead to

suicide.

Stockholm Exergi has been keeping Stockholmers warm for over 100 years. Now they

wanted an initiative to help make Stockholm a little warmer and more socially sustainable.

After two years of development, we launched the patent pending Memory Lane. It’s the

world’s first reverse engineered voice assistant that can drive a meaningful conversation – it

can ask personal questions and relevant follow-up questions.

Its mission is to improve the well-being of people struggling with the dire consequences of

unwanted loneliness, by sharing their amazing stories.

Strategy:

Stockholm has one of the largest single household populations in the world, making its

citizens one of the loneliest in the world. It is a great city for singles but not so much for

senior citizens.

Before the project was launched, we conducted in-depth interviews with leading doctors in

the field of elderly care and dementia together with organizations that are active in assisted

living and nursing homes in Stockholm.

Stockholm Exergi also conducted factual research on verified independent published

research on consequences of unwanted loneliness and isolation both locally and globally.

They also interviewed senior citizens.

Project Memory Lane wants to make Stockholm a warmer and inclusive city in a new,

emotional way for everyone.

Execution: 

By using a smart speaker device, we have been collecting stories through vocal

interactions. The data was stored and leveraged to create what we called the Memory

Graph, a data structure based on hierarchical taxonomy where information is represented

as nodes (key words) and edges (emotions/interactions).

In order to generate a story, we processed The Memory Graph to extract key information

and summarize the data, leveraging extractive and abstractive neural network. The patent

pending technology of Project Memory Lane then allowed us to automate a story creation,

that generated the world’s first co-authored book between human and AI.

The campaign is a social-first activation through the client's owned and paid social media

channels together with influencers and PR at the core of the campaign. The objective is to

spark conversations and put the issue of unwanted loneliness on top of the societal agenda,

as well as continuing to contribute to the corporate social sustainability “Together We Make

Stockholm Warmer”.

Results:

We installed Memory Lane voice assistants in participants’ homes and it instantly sparked

self-perpetuating, personal conversations.

Memory Lane has resulted in the world’s first podcast series, where our voice assistant has

conversations with people that share their life stories and memories.

These conversations also generated the world’s first books, co-authored by artificial

intelligence and the participants of the Memory Lane Project. The books are shared with the

participants as well as internally at Stockholm Exergi and externally with customers and

partners to create project awareness. They are a manifestation of how we together can

make Stockholm a warmer, more socially sustainable and inclusive city.

To reach a broader target and increase the awareness, we also made documentation that

has so far resulted in videos and social media assets. This has generated goodwill and PR

impact for the project.

o SoMe project:

§ Period Start: 11 June - end 8 July

§ Views 2,336,397

§ Click Through Rate 113% better than average benchmark (1.92 vs 0.9)

§ Cost per view 39% better than average benchmark (0.08 vs 1.17)

o Phase 2 - Podcast launch

§ Top rank (1-2) in Google out of 350,000,000 results

§ Top rank (1) in Spotify

§ Top rank (1) in Acast

Scalability: 

The Memory Lane technology is scalable at the pace and growth of voice assistants which is

a rapidly growing home device across the Nordics. The tech solution is platform agnostic

and works across both Google Home and Amazon Alexa.

We anticipated that for a biographer to question all potential participating people, collect

their answers, process the information and write a book, would take between 2-3 months to

execute manually. Instead, we created a built-in feature in the Memory Lane solution to

scale the questioning aspect, the transcriptions of the answers and to semi-automate the

story writing.

The project Memory Lane led to generate other opportunities with different clients to

accompany them on the help of the elderly (Australia, France, UK…).

The problem Memory Lane is trying to solve is definitely global and widespread. For

example, about 43% of older adults in the United States live alone or feel lonely. Memory

Lane could provide them a sense of contact and social activity by having conversations with

the device, sharing their thoughts and memories.

The COVID-19 crisis also accelerated on the support of companies to help the elderly, which

could create opportunities to transfer and extend the work to new shapes, markets,

demographics. This crisis heavily impacted traditional business for many companies, which

had to find innovative ways to be close to the consumers again. This led to new social

initiatives for the brands to take care of their consumers and do business in a purposeful

way. The project Memory Lane is totally aligned with this movement and this vision of

innovation.