Inspiration
Over 600,000 people in Lithuania are 65 or older. Only 65% of those aged 65–74 use the internet, and phone scammers took over €20 million from Lithuanians in 2025. Most solutions ask seniors to learn an app. We flipped it around: almost every grandmother can make a phone call.
What it does
Onutė is an AI voice assistant that speaks Lithuanian. Seniors call a phone number and ask about the weather, the nearest pharmacy and whether it's open, or anything they'd otherwise search online. She also warns callers about scams. She gives short, accurate answers and doesn't make small talk.
How we built it
- ElevenLabs Conversational AI with a Lithuanian voice
- Telnyx phone number connected over SIP
- Supabase Edge Function tools: weather (Open-Meteo), places (OpenStreetMap / LocationIQ), web search (Firecrawl)
- Automated call simulations to compare LLMs on accuracy and cost
Challenges
- Twilio's trial couldn't call Lithuanian numbers, so we switched to Telnyx.
- The public map API blocked our servers, so we moved to LocationIQ.
- Lithuania has a village called Šiauliai, so we now check both the city and the county.
- One premium model made up about $\tfrac{1}{3}$ of a call's cost. Simulations helped us find a cheaper model that writes clean Lithuanian.
- Seniors pause while speaking, so we tuned turn-taking to avoid interrupting them.
What we learned
With voice AI, the hard part is accuracy, not the voice. Lithuanian needs testing at every layer, and the simplest interface for seniors is still a phone call.
Built With
- claude
- elevenlabs
- firecrawl
- meteo
- open
- openstreetmap
- supabase
- telnyx
