SINGAPORE – For many, reading letters is a simple, everyday task often taken for granted – a brief glance before setting the papers aside.

But during a series of visits to an active ageing centre in June, a group of five young adults quickly realised that this routine act was far from straightforward for some older individuals.

“A significant number of seniors would approach staff members with a bundle of government-issued letters throughout the day, requiring help with letter-reading and translation,” said 27-year-old Owen Gan , a user interface and experience design intern at Trinax.

Each request typically required anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours of assistance from a centre employee, with language barriers at times further complicating the process.

To help both parties save time and effort, the group created LetterKey – a web app that helps to translate, summarise and highlight key information in letters from government agencies.

Apart from translating content in the four official languages, it can also translate content to Cantonese and Hokkien.

Some of the more common letters that staff encounter are insurance-related ones from Income Insurance, and income-related ones from the Central Provident Fund Board.

“Though government letters typically come in four languages, one of the key points we want to address is the complexity of some terms used,” said Mr Gan, who added that the tool helps simplify such terms and extract actionable information.

For instance, a Workfare letter may contain terms such as “payouts” and “contributions”, which might be a little advanced for those with a basic grasp of English, said Mr Gan’s teammate, Ms Cham Li Hui.

The 24-year-old product data scientist and her four teammates met during the inaugural Sparks x Build for Good Community Hackathon in June .

This event, co-organised by the People’s Association and Open Government Products , brought together youth keen on developing tech-driven solutions to tackle community challenges.

The LetterKey team was one of five that advanced to an eight-week accelerator programme, where they received $20,000 and mentorship support from industry leaders to scale their project.

After observing and interacting with seniors at Fei Yue Active Ageing Centre in Senja Road, the team began trialling a self-service kiosk, which has been located in Bukit Panjang Community Club for a month now.

This self-service kiosk was the team’s first version of LetterKey as many seniors preferred a tangible machine at a fixed location.

“A kiosk would also allow them to seek help from (community club) staff whenever they encounter issues, which helps them adapt to digital solutions,” said Mr Gan.

“For seniors unable to get help from their immediate family members, it also gives them an excuse to head down to the community centre to interact with others, which helps them socially.”

The LetterKey team helping a senior scan a letter at the physical kiosk in Bukit Panjang Community Club in July.

PHOTO: OPEN GOVERNMENT PRODUCTS

Soon after, LetterKey was introduced as both a web app and a WhatsApp chatbot, following feedback from younger seniors who were more familiar with using mobile phones. Over the past month, 120 people have tried out LetterKey, with two-thirds of them being physical kiosk users.

The team made some observations that led to a few adjustments, such as the removal of extra buttons that had been causing some users unnecessary confusion, said 23-year-old Loo Ping Wee, a computer science undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University .

LetterKey is powered by Gemini and GPT-5, large-language models (LLMs) developed by Google and OpenAI, respectively. Such models are known for their ability to process, generate and summarise text.

Sensitive information, such as a person’s NRIC number, phone number and home address, is automatically redacted by LetterKey before the letters are analysed by these models.

LetterKey helps to translate, summarise and highlight key information in letters from government agencies.

ST PHOTOS: GAVIN FOO

To minimise the risk of LLM hallucinations, which refers to false information, the output from each model is checked against the other to ensure that the response is coherent and in agreement, before it is put together to create the eventual summary sent to users, said Mr Loo. Users also receive a text-to-speech audio of the summary, which is delivered in a local accent.

Instead of asking the models to provide general summaries of letters, the team ensured that specific prompts are given to provide a more targeted answer, said Mr Gan.

He added: “There are a few questions that seniors would ask about the letter. Specifically, what do I have to do, what does this mean for me, and how can I get help for this?

“This is more helpful in answering the questions that are already in the minds of these seniors.”

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A test done by The Straits Times on an insurance premium payment letter found that LetterKey was able to accurately highlight key points such as the amount due and available payment methods.

However, the usefulness of the tool was affected as some critical information was redacted, such as the payment due date.

LetterKey’s physical kiosk will soon be moved to the active ageing centre in Senja Road to enable the team to gather more feedback from an older demographic of seniors, said Ms Cham.

The team has no plans to launch more physical kiosks in the near future, and will be focusing on improving the web app and WhatsApp interface.

“But in the future, if we’re going to expand to have more functionalities, having it on WhatsApp will limit a lot of customisation options,” said Ms Cham, adding that the team will not rule out the possibility of launching a phone app in the future, depending on the user adoption rate.

The team is also in the process of considering whether other groups can benefit from LetterKey, such as transnational families that do not speak the common languages in Singapore.

To tackle this, the team is in talks with national programme AI Singapore to possibly incorporate Sea-Lion (South-east Asian Languages in One Network), said Ms Cham. The open-source LLM supports 13 languages, including Thai and Vietnamese, and reflects South-east Asian native characteristics.

The team is also looking to partner with volunteer networks to increase awareness of LetterKey among seniors. For instance, working with digital ambassadors stationed at community centres islandwide would help to spread the word quicker, said Ms Cham.

“There could be potential in having a train-the-trainer model, where we teach these digital ambassadors who are usually seniors as well,” she added.

“And then they can teach other seniors within the community how to use LetterKey. We feel that this is the best way, those of the same age teaching each other.”

Those interested in trying LetterKey can visit its

site here

.

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