locl

Inspiration

I'm a digital nomad who spends lots of time traveling to different countries. I've definitely run into several occasions where I needed something from a local business (a restaurant, a clothing store, etc) and I didn't know how to communicate with them over the phone.

What it does

Lets AI call businesses on your behalf and speak to them in their language. Give the AI whatever details it needs, then it'll call the business; afterward it'll send you a summary.

There's another mode (not published yet), where the user can listen-in on the (translated) call and provide real-time verbal guidance to the AI.

How we built it

• Bolt did all of the frontend and most of the server functions
• Twilio for telephony
• Elevenlabs for TTS
• Lingo.dev for i18n
• OpenAI for AI chatting
• Stripe for payments

Challenges we ran into

• Could NOT get conversation agents to work in Elevenlabs; would have been SO much easier to simply call their API and let their agents do all the work with the right prompt, but the agents refused to stay in character and would regress to being customer service agents
• OpenAI wants devs to use their Responses API; Bolt (and other coding agents) doesn't have a lot of experience using this (they always default to chat completions)
• Testing 3rd party services (like Twilio) via webhooks could not be done inside Bolt

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Got a pretty good MVP out; it's functional: users are able to chat with the AI in whatsapp and have it make calls for them

What we learned

• Countries have weird phone restrictions; supporting phone calls in all countries will be hard work
• Prompt-chaining is really powerful: passing the output of one AI conversation into another works surprisingly well

What's next for locl

• Work on the next feature: AI-assisted phone calls where user is on the phone with both the AI and merchant and can whisper instructions to the AI in real-time while they're listening to the translated conversation

Built With

• elevenlabs
• elysia
• lingo
• neon
• nuxt
• openai
• twilio