Inspiration

Many independent business owners serve customers while also answering calls and messages. A delayed response can become a lost appointment, especially when customer and owner prefer different languages. As a full-stack developer in Katrineholm who speaks English, Swedish, Amharic, and Tigrinya and already works with local businesses, I wanted to build a front desk that could act quickly without pretending to know more than the owner has approved.

What it does

A business configures its services, prices, hours, and escalation rules. Customers then ask questions or request appointments through a multilingual assistant. Gemini detects intent, responds in the customer's language, gathers the minimum information required for a booking request, and escalates complaints, refunds, uncertainty, or restricted actions. Each decision includes its source, confidence, intent, action, status, and escalation state.

SelamDesk does not invent prices or claim that a booking is confirmed. A booking becomes booking-ready only after the service, requested time, and customer name are collected; owner confirmation remains explicit until a verified calendar integration is enabled.

How I built it

I built SelamDesk as a fully functional MVP within the hackathon timeframe, prioritizing a working core loop over unnecessary features.

The stack is Next.js and TypeScript, containerized and deployed serverlessly on Google Cloud Run for zero-ops scalability. For the AI brain, I integrated the official Google Gen AI SDK using Gemini's native multilingual reasoning to skip building separate translation and intent pipelines. This single-pass approach saved us critical dev hours while handling complex customer messages robustly.

Here’s the flow: Gemini interprets the incoming message, evaluates it against the owner's dynamic business rules, drafts the best response, and logs a structured decision record to Firestore. Every action captures the agent's choice, confidence score, and whether it correctly escalated to a human—giving owners full auditability out of the box.

To keep operations lean, I used Cloud Logging for structured event streaming and Secret Manager to securely store the single admin credential. While automated weekly reports are on our roadmap, I deliberately scoped them out to nail real-time performance during the hackathon. The result is a clean, working agent that ships in minutes.

Challenges I ran into

The main challenge was balancing fast autonomous service with business accountability. A fluent answer is not enough when a wrong price or false booking can harm a real customer. I addressed this with owner-approved facts, schema-validated outputs, a confidence threshold, explicit restricted actions, and inspectable decisions that exclude raw message text from durable logs.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

  • A deployed multilingual Gemini front desk with strict business guardrails.
  • Structured and inspectable AI decisions rather than unmeasured chat output.
  • Privacy-safe logging and explicit human escalation.
  • Server-authoritative business profiles and consented booking requests.
  • A production architecture using Cloud Run, Firestore, Cloud Logging, and Secret Manager.

What I learned

Fluent multilingual output is not sufficient for a business agent: prices and rules must be server-authoritative, model output must be schema validated, and restricted actions must be enforced after the model responds. I also learned to separate useful decision evidence from raw customer messages and to label demonstration traffic separately from traction. Commercially, the pricing and unit economics remain hypotheses until paid arms-length pilots provide real retention, support-cost, and margin data.

What's next for SelamDesk

The immediate priority is to operate paid local pilots, reconcile real revenue and expenses, and compare response time and qualified-request conversion with each owner's baseline. After that, SelamDesk will deepen one workflow at a time: calendar confirmation, owner-approved messaging channels, and automated weekly reports. Expansion will follow proven customer demand rather than feature breadth.

Share this project:

Updates

posted an update

Submission clarification — August 12, 2026

SelamDesk is being submitted by Yoseph B. Gebremedhin as the sole entrant. An earlier update that named another contributor and described an automatic follow-up feature and a launched founding pilot is outdated. Automatic follow-up is not part of the current production MVP, and no business is counted as a verified user or customer without completing a meaningful test and providing consent.

Current verified status: the public Cloud Run product uses Gemini 3.5 Flash through Vertex AI, controlled demo decisions are recorded as demo traffic, and the submission reports $0 revenue, 0 verified users, and 0 paying users. Please use the latest project story, repository evidence, and submission materials as the authoritative description.

Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.

posted an update

Hey everyone, time for a SelamDesk update!

First off, super excited to have Kaleb from Afrolabs in Ethiopia officially hacking alongside me on this. We’ve been heads-down these past few days just fleshing out the project details—and honestly, having someone else in the trenches with you makes a world of difference.

So, a quick reality check on where we’re at. Remember the original email-to-SMS idea? Yeah, we iterated. Hard. After talking to actual business owners, we realized what immigrant small businesses really need isn't just a bridge. It's a front desk that actually speaks their customers' language. So that's what SelamDesk is becoming: a multilingual AI receptionist for salons, barbers, tailors, and cleaners. It handles questions in Swedish, English, Amharic, and Tigrinya, qualifies booking requests, follows up automatically, and only bothers the owner when a human touch is absolutely necessary.

We're keeping the MVP tight. We just launched a founding pilot here in Sörmland, Sweden. Only 5 spots available, and we can get a business set up in about 7 days. If you know an immigrant-owned shop drowning in missed calls or WhatsApp chaos, send them my way.

Feels good to finally be building with a clear direction. More commits (and tea) coming soon.

// Yoseph

Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.