For Homeboy Industries
Someone always picks up.
A phone line any homie can call, day or night, in English or Spanish. It listens, finds the Homeboy service that fits, and hands back one step for today. In the morning, Homeboy's team sees the call and picks up where it left off.
Sample calls
Hear a call.
Pick a caller and press the green button. The callers are made up. Every Homeboy service, address and phone number they hear is real, read from public pages on November 4, 2026.
What Homeboy's team sees
Call summary, filled in while the homie talks
Press the green button. As the caller talks, this fills in: what they need, the Homeboy services that fit with the words from Homeboy's own page, and the one step they leave with.
What it changes
Help between the visits.
Everything at Homeboy starts with walking in the front door. The companion gets more homies to that door, knowing what to ask for, and covers the hours when it's closed.
Answers at 2 AM
Every call gets answered, any hour, in English or Spanish. No voicemail, no hold music.
One step, not a list
A homie leaves with one thing to do today, said back to them and texted to their phone.
Homeboy first
It reads Homeboy's own services first, then more than 70 programs across LA County and California, each phone number checked at its source.
Back to a person
Every call lands in a morning queue: a trainee's navigator, or the front desk for someone new. Nobody tells their story twice.
How it stays honest
Built so it can't make things up.
It never says a number it wasn't given
The AI writes a placeholder; code fills in the phone number or address from Homeboy's checked list. A number that isn't on the list can't be said.
Safety runs first
Before any answer, a check reads the caller's words for danger, in English and Spanish. A risk stops the conversation, gives 988 or 911, and flags staff.
No legal, medical or immigration advice
It never tells someone what a judge will do or what a pill will do. It points to the Homeboy team that can.
Every fact shows where it came from
Staff see the source of each service and the date it was checked. "Unknown" is an allowed answer; a confident guess isn't.
Already built once
It starts from SAL.
SAL is the voice helper Steve's AI Consulting built at the Claude Impact Lab in October 2026, for Illumination Health + Home's clients leaving recuperative care. It interviews in plain words, searches a checked list while the person talks, and hands back today's one step. Fetch, built at the same event for referral packets, won it.
The Homeboy Companion keeps SAL's engine and safety checks, swaps in Homeboy's services, and moves from a tablet to a phone number.
SAL's own test results, October 17, 2026. Claude played each made-up client.
The plan
From this page to a real number.
Load Homeboy
Homeboy's services, hours and who handles what go in. A navigator checks every line before it goes live.
Rehearse
Navigators call it, playing homies they know. Anything wrong gets fixed and called again.
Pilot
One phone number for a small group of homies for 30 days. Every call lands in the navigators' morning queue.
Decide with numbers
How many called after hours, how many took their step, and how many reached a navigator the next day.
Next step
Thirty minutes with two navigators.
They list the questions homies ask most, after hours and on the first day home. Those become the first test calls, and the companion's first week of work.