Aira

Inspiration Moving to Bengaluru for college or work is exciting, but finding a place to stay can be exhausting. Renters often have to call multiple PG owners to ask the same questions: Is a room available? What’s included in the rent? How much is the deposit? Can I visit this weekend?

We built Aira to take some of that work off their plate. Give Aira your requirements and a property contact, and its voice agent can make the enquiry for you. What it does Aira calls PG owners and managers to ask about room availability, rent, food, Wi-Fi, deposits and other requirements. It can also negotiate for better terms and arrange a visit during the renter’s preferred time.

We wanted negotiation to be more than a generic request for a discount. Aira can use details mentioned by the owner—such as an extra electricity charge or a deposit deduction—as a reason to ask for a better deal. How we built it We built the owner-enquiry voice agent on Vaani AI’s voice agent platform. We provided the renter’s requirements as a single text input and designed the agent’s prompt to guide the conversation, negotiation and visit scheduling.

We tested the agent through phone calls, reviewed the transcripts using Vaani’s API, and refined the prompt based on how the conversations actually went. Challenges Getting useful answers was only part of the challenge. Early versions sounded too formal, asked several questions in one turn, or repeated the renter’s entire brief. Other calls showed the agent agreeing too quickly or missing an opportunity to negotiate.

We refined the agent to answer the owner’s question first, keep each turn short, listen before moving to the next topic, and begin negotiating when the price comes up. We also gave it boundaries: it can arrange a viewing, but it shouldn’t commit to renting the room or making a payment. What we learned A voice agent needs more than a list of questions. It has to listen, remember what the other person said, adapt its next question and know when to stop talking. Reviewing real call transcripts helped us find problems that weren’t obvious from the prompt alone.

Aira is a hackathon prototype focused on the owner-enquiry call. We’d like to build a renter-facing app next, where users can review their requirements, provide property contacts and compare the results of multiple calls.

Built With

• prompt-engineering
• rest-api
• vaani-ai
• voice-ai