Inspiration
Millions of people in India cannot type or read a form, so their problems never reach the office that could solve them. We watched grandparents, daily-wage workers and farmers wait in queues just to ask one question about a scheme they are entitled to. The one interface they already know how to use is a phone call.
What it does
AwaazSetu is a voice-first AI bridge in Marathi and Hindi. Anyone without a smartphone dials a number, states a civic, health or government-scheme problem in their own words, and the AI agent:
- Understands and triages the problem with spoken follow-up questions
- Files it with the right government office or a verified local volunteer
- Calls the citizen back with status updates, in voice, until it is resolved
The volunteer and office side gets a simple dashboard for intake, routing and resolution tracking.
How we'd build it
- A dial-in IVR layer (Twilio or similar) so any basic phone works
- Indic speech-to-text and text-to-speech for Marathi and Hindi (open models like AI4Bharat)
- An agentic AI layer for triage, classification and routing, with human-in-the-loop verification for anything sensitive
- An audit trail so every routed request can be tracked and escalated
Challenges we've mapped
Designing triage so an urgent health issue is never misrouted, handling Marathi dialect variation, and keeping personal details given over voice safe. We have scoped all three as design requirements for the build phase.
What we learned
The hardest part is not the AI, it is the last mile: verified volunteers and trust on both ends of the call. AwaazSetu is designed around that, not around the model.
Built With
- ai-agents
- ai4bharat
- civic-tech
- hindi
- indic-languages
- ivr
- llm
- marathi
- voice-ai
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