Inspiration

Refugees who don't speak English have huge problems navigating the asylum system. Many do not have access to a computer - particularly those in detention.

What it does

Karibu is a phone-based legal assistant that can take incoming calls and understands and speaks many languages. It is connected to a database of legal advice.

Karibu can understand

Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian,
Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish,
French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic,
Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian,
Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish,
Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili,
Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh

and can speak

Afrikaans, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English,
Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic
Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Marathi,
Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish,
Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh

in a native voice.

How we built it

Karibu is implemented using Twilio, Anthropic Claude, MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, Whisper and GCP's text-to-speech.

Challenges we ran into

Twilio's voice transcription is inaccurate and requires the language to be specified in advance. Waiting for Twilio to provide recordings is also slow. By listening in to the call, using websockets, and transcribing it ourselves, we can support multilingual transcriptions, improve accuracy and reduce the latency by ~5 seconds.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building something that can take a phone call, transcribe it in many languages, research an answer from a high quality dataset (in this case, .gov.uk) and speak back to the user in their native language in <24 hours!

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