Beacon Platform
We are proud to be working with the community to fill a critical gap in accessibility by developing innovative ways for residents of King County to access accurate information about local resources.
Our first product is a natural language interface providing access to a comprehensive verified database of all publicly available resources in Seattle and King County.
Resource Verification
We know how important it is that potentially life-saving results are accurate and up to date.
Many services have closed since Covid, shelters have moved, and new services have become available. To address this we have a system where social workers with the most recent knowledge work with community volunteers to validate all the fragmented information that exists about resources in King County.
Once resources are verified they are added to our database and can be accessed by the public, assured that the information is accurate and up to date.
Web Interface
Access verified King County resources with an easy to use chatbot.
Natural Language
Keywords aren't necessary because the Beacon bot understands natural language. It's as easy as typing or saying "I'm hungry" and it understands that the request is to find a list of local food banks and pantries.
Accessibility
We are disabled ourselves and passionate about accessibility.
The goal isn't to meet compliance and provide the bare minimum. We are aiming to push the boundaries of accessibility by making our platform as inclusive as possible, compassionately serving blind, deaf, cognitively impaired, mobility impaired, and those with limited literacy or troubles with technology. Multilingual support is also built in.
Security and Privacy
No third party tracking, no data collection, no ads.
We are beyond committed to protecting privacy. We do not track users, collect data, or serve ads. Anything sent is anonymized and personally identifiable information is stripped as the very first step. Anything saved is entirely on the device. We understand the sensitivity of the information we are dealing with and prefer to sidestep the issue entirely by collecting nothing.
Our goal is to bring the large language models in-house as well to further protect user privacy.
AI Ethics and Bias
We are committed to building an ethical and unbiased platform.
This is an emerging field and we believe that it's important to be proactive in our approach. With no federal regulations on the horizon, we are planning on leading by example and setting a new standard for how AI ethics should be approached.
Our AI ethics policy is on the chatbot site and goes into more detail about our approach.
SMS and Call Support
Soon we will be expanding the Beacon Platform to include call-in and SMS support lines for King County that will utilize our verified database, furthering our mission of providing accurate resources to all people. Not everyone has a smartphone and we want to make sure that everyone has access to the resources they need.
The Future
The Beacon Platform is a way for social services to scale with technology and continue to serve the community with verified resources into the future.