County hears demonstration of EVA AI phone and interview assistant for social services; vendors describe data protections and limits

Company representatives from TipToe Automated introduced EVA, an AI-driven customer-assistant product that handles inbound calls, conducts scripted interviews and provides an internal "companion" answer bot for staff.

Andrea Tipping and Greg Tipping, cofounders of TipToe Automated, told legislators the product suite includes EVA Phone (an AI front-line phone agent), EVA Interview (automated interview capture for eligibility forms) and EVA Companion (a document-driven answer bot for staff). They said EVA Phone is multilingual and can be trained on county websites and PDFs, and EVA Interview can capture required intake fields and present them to a worker.

During a live demonstration, the team played sample transcripts in which EVA introduced itself: "Thank you for calling the Westchester County Department of Social Services. My name is Eva. I'm an AI customer service assistant who can answer your questions and give you general information." The presenters emphasized that EVA uses a retrieval-augmented generation approach designed to reduce so-called "hallucination" and to answer questions from agency policy and training documents rather than generate free-form responses from open internet sources.

County officials asked about confidentiality, crisis handling and system availability. The company said EVA runs on Amazon Web Services and has passed foundational technical review steps that support FedRAMP-moderate expectations; it encrypts data at rest and in transit and uses multifactor authentication. Presenters said the system retains records by default for seven years, can be configured for different retention requirements, and that the system is set to detect and delete Social Security numbers if they appear in transcripts.

On crisis response, the company said EVA monitors sentiment and keywords and can be configured to transfer calls to 911 or a human operator if indicators of imminent harm are detected. On capacity and uptime, presenters said EVA can theoretically handle up to 1,000 concurrent calls and would roll over to human operators if the county's preferred failover configuration is reached or if the system is down.

Presenters also described real-world use: they said EVA'phone and interview products have been deployed in multiple states and nine New York counties (they expect to reach a tenth county pending work). The company said EVA can reduce hold times and the burden on staff by automating routine scripts (for example, rights-and-responsibilities readings for SNAP applicants), translating non-English calls and capturing interview data into native eligibility forms for staff review.

No procurement decisions or votes were made during the presentation; the session was an informational briefing and Q&A.