Apparently, someone came up with an AI that calls your grandparents for you. Yes, you read that right. A gentle and caring artificial intelligence that rings up the elders while you dazzle on Zoom or scroll TikTok into a state of complete filial amnesia.
The service is called inTouch (https://www.intouch.family/fr), but inTact might have been just as fitting. It simulates empathy so well that even your grandmother feels moved. She hangs up feeling lighter, convinced she just spoke with someone… even if that “someone” is just a line of affectionate code with a faint synthetic accent.
The idea, supposedly, comes from a good place—keeping in touch despite distance, time pressure, or the perfectly understandable urge not to hear, for the eighth time, the 1954 story about beets. But you know how the saying goes: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So was the atom, by the way. It was supposed to light up homes—maybe someone should remind the people of Nagasaki.
Seriously, what kind of world are we living in? A world where tenderness becomes an outsourced service, where “I miss you, Grandma” is handed off to a bot the way you’d ship a parcel via Amazon. The feeling remains, the effort disappears.
Convenient, isn’t it?
inTouch is the illegitimate child of well-meaning tech and emotional laziness. Like Cupid trading in his arrows for a voice bot: it hits the mark, but it doesn’t feel a thing.
Then comes that awkward moment when you receive, after every call, a “mood indicator” from Grandma. She’s happy today, the algorithm says. That’s reassuring. Almost touching. But what if she hadn’t been happy? Would we reboot her joy? Add an emotional patch in the next update?
And the cherry on top: this emotional outsourcing service costs “just €29.90 a month“. Less than a bouquet of flowers, but enough to maintain the illusion of a real connection without ever lifting a finger. Delivered with the voice of tenderness, minus the actual effort of being tender.
And the cherry on the cherry? Their tagline is pure gold: “Keep your parent safe, entertained, and engaged.” A promise as neatly packaged as a premium dog food ad. Just add “100% organic, GMO-free, MSG-free, guilt-free” and you’re all set.
So no, we’re not stopping progress. We’re dressing it up in fine clothes: empathy, inclusion, care for the elderly… And yet I remain genuinely, almost ecstatically, stunned by humanity’s ability to blend technological intelligence with emotional foolishness. Because it takes a special kind of genius to invent tools meant to bring people closer—then use them so we don’t have to call each other anymore.
One day, perhaps, our grandchildren will invent an AI to cry at our funerals.
And it’ll do a great job.