Nyaya Saathi - Civic Docs on Apertus

Sovereign offline AI that explains legal & civic docs in your own dialect - Swiss-German, French, Urdu & more - using open Apertus, no foreign cloud

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Inspiration

In Switzerland, a tenant struggles with a German rental contract, in Zurich a SME owner can't parse a tax form in French, and in Chakwal, Pakistan, my mother can't read a land record in English. All face same problem: they must upload sensitive CNIC, contracts to US closed AIs, losing data sovereignty. Switzerland built Apertus as 100% open, sovereign LLM - we asked: can Apertus explain civic docs in your own dialect, fully offline?

What it does

Nyaya Saathi is a privacy-first assistant powered by Apertus.

  • Upload any civic/legal PDF: Swiss tenancy contract, tax notice, Pakistan domicile, SME compliance form
  • Choose your dialect: Swiss-German, French, Italian, English, Urdu, Punjabi & more
  • Get simple, point-wise explanation in your language, with key risks highlighted
  • 100% offline via Ollama - no data leaves your laptop/phone. True sovereignty.

From a farmer in Chakwal to a shop owner in Bern - same model, same trust.

How we built it

  • Model: Apertus-8B-Instruct running locally via Ollama, quantized to 4-bit for low-cost devices (Toshiba laptop tested)
  • Pipeline: PDF -> PyMuPDF text extraction -> Prompt with dialect instruction -> Apertus -> Simple explanation + JSON of key clauses
  • Frontend: Gradio for offline demo, supports 6 languages
  • Localization: Few-shot prompting for dialects, not full fine-tune, to stay lightweight and open

Challenges we ran into

  • Running 8B model on old hardware - solved with Q4 quantization
  • Swiss-German dialect has little training data - used few-shot examples from locals
  • PDF parsing for Urdu nastaliq script - added OCR fallback

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proved Apertus goes beyond Swiss borders - from Alps to Punjab, sovereign AI can serve 230M Urdu/Punjabi speakers offline, same as Swiss dialects. Aligned with Apertus mission of open, inclusive, sovereign AI for public good.

What's next

  • Add voice: offline Urdu/Punjabi TTS like our Dawat AI project
  • SME compliance agent: auto-check contracts + monthly subscription model
  • Expand to 20 dialects, publish open dataset of civic doc explanations

Built With

  • apertus
  • civic-tech
  • gradio
  • multilingual
  • ollama
  • open-source
  • pymupdf
  • python
  • sovereign-ai
  • swiss-german
  • urdu
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Updates

posted an update —

Day 1: Nyaya Saathi is Live!

I built Nyaya Saathi - Civic Docs on Apertus - an AI app that explains complex legal documents in simple local language.

Problem: In Pakistan, especially in small towns like Daultala, people receive court notices, rent agreements, and contracts they can't understand. Lawyer fees are too high.

Solution: Upload your document (photo / PDF) AI explains it in your local language (Urdu / Punjabi) so anyone can understand Ask questions in your own language - "What are my rights in this?"

Tech: Built on Apertus, making justice accessible for everyone in their own language.

This is my Medici Project, built on my old Toshiba laptop - Laptop + Internet = Opportunity.

Next: Video demo + Voice support.

LegalTech #Pakistan #Apertus #Urdu #AIforGood

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Submission history