SachAI - Your Personal Fake News Detector

Inspiration

Every day, millions of Indians receive forwarded WhatsApp messages containing fake news, health misinformation, communal propaganda, and political manipulation. We personally experienced this in our own families - elderly relatives forwarding dangerous health remedies, fake political headlines causing panic, and doctored images spreading like wildfire. Existing fact-checking websites like AltNews and Boom require users to manually visit, search, and read - too many steps for most people. We wanted to build something that works instantly, inside the tools people already use, in the language they speak. That inspiration became SachAI.

What it does

SachAI is an AI-powered fake news detector that instantly verifies any claim a user sends. Simply type, share an image, or paste a URL - SachAI searches trusted sources in real time and responds with a clear verdict: TRUE, FALSE, MISLEADING, or UNVERIFIED - along with sources and a short explanation.

Key capabilities:

• Verifies text claims in seconds
• Reads images and extracts text using OCR
• Fetches and analyzes news article URLs
• Responds in Hindi, Gujarati, or English automatically based on user's language
• Real-time web search via BraveSearch and
  • Zero learning curve - just send a message

How we built it

SachAI is built entirely on the Airia Agent Studio using a multi-node pipeline:

1. Input Node - accepts text, image, and URL inputs
2. Conditional Branch Router - Python-based router that detects input type and routes to the correct branch (Image / URL / Text)
3. Image OCR Node - GPT-4o powered vision node that extracts text from images
4. URL Fetcher Node - extracts headline and content from news article URLs
5. Claim Extractor Node - GPT 4.1 distills the core verifiable claim from any input
6. BraveSearch MCP - searches real-time web for fact-checks and news related to the claim
7. Verdict Generator Node - GPT 4.1 synthesizes all search results and generates a structured verdict in the user's language

The entire pipeline runs in seconds with no coding required from the end user - just send a message and get the truth.

Challenges we ran into

• Image Input enablement was locked to specific models in Airia - solved by switching to GPT-4o for the Image OCR node
• The Conditional Branch Router initially did not detect images sent as files - fixed by checking all possible client_data fields including images array, files array, and step_inputs
• Getting consistent multilingual responses was tricky - solved by adding strict language rules in the Verdict Generator prompt
• Connecting outputs from three different branches back into a single Claim Extractor node required careful variable mapping in Airia
• Balancing response length for voice vs text output formats needed separate prompt handling ## Accomplishments that we're proud of
• Built a fully working multi-branch AI agent pipeline in Airia from scratch
• Successfully handles text, image, and URL inputs in a single unified agent
• Real-time fact-checking using two independent search sources (BraveSearch + Perplexity) for higher accuracy
• Seamless multilingual support - Hindi, Gujarati, and English with automatic language detection
• Zero friction user experience - no app download, no login, no technical knowledge needed
• Solves a real problem affecting 500+ million Indian users daily ## What we learned
• Airia's MCP Server integrations make connecting external search tools incredibly fast - what would take days of coding took hours
• Prompt engineering for multilingual outputs requires explicit strict rules, not just examples
• Router/Conditional Branch logic needs to check multiple data fields as different clients send images in different ways
• Breaking a complex problem into small focused nodes makes debugging and improving each step much easier
• Real-time search is essential for fake news detection - static LLM knowledge alone is not enough for recent news events ## What's next for SachAI - Your Personal Fake News Detector
• WhatsApp Business API integration - users can forward messages directly to SachAI's WhatsApp number for instant verification
• Telegram and Instagram DM support
• Confidence score displayed with every verdict
• Community database - frequently checked claims cached for faster responses
• Expansion to 10 Indian languages including Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and Marathi
• Browser extension - highlight fake news on social media feeds as you scroll
• Partnership with PIB India for official government corrections fed directly into SachAI
• Analytics dashboard for NGOs to track trending misinformation patterns across India

Built With

• agent
• airia