TARA: Your Voice Guide from Request to Payment

Actual editable review: named bakery pages and requirements retained from the conversation. Synthetic details.
Actual Tara interface: optional voice or text, published services and sandbox-only payments.
Actual Tara 3.9.2: editable requirements and PayPal summary preserve the keyboard-navigation requirement. Synthetic details.
TARA by Ability Bazaar: Transaction and Request Assistant. Optional voice or text, editable requests and PayPal test checkout.

Your words. Your choices. A clearer next step.

Vision-Aid works with visually impaired people to support skills, independence and opportunity. Its disability-led Ability Bazaar marketplace offers accessibility services, websites, apps and free tools. Tara gives visitors an optional conversational route into that existing platform.

A blind or low-vision customer may prefer describing a need aloud to navigating several catalogue pages and filling another form. Other visitors may prefer typing or keyboard controls. Tara is designed to offer those choices, with the customer deciding what happens next.

Discover, describe and review

Tara means Transaction and Request Assistant. It covers website and app development, accessibility testing, document remediation, custom work and free apps. Ask about Maya or Saarthi, follow a verified resource, or start a service request.

Choose Talk to Tara to hear a welcome and, with microphone permission, begin a two-way conversation. Ordinary page visits stay silent. Visible text, typing, keyboard controls, Stop and Repeat remain available.

In our illustrative bakery journey, the customer asks for five named website pages, a catering form, opening hours and readable text. Tara explains published packages and keeps the actual wording in an editable brief. Separate requests retain separate drafts. A failed AI response keeps the words and explains how to continue.

The customer checks the scope, contact details and catalogue price, adds keyboard-friendly navigation, and reviews or edits the short summary that will appear on PayPal. Full requirements remain in the Tara brief. Long automatic summaries mark omitted detail rather than silently implying everything is shown.

PayPal is part of the journey

After explicit confirmation, the server creates a PayPal Orders API order using the catalogue price and reviewed summary. PayPal displays the chosen service, an item description and the amount, and handles buyer sign-in and approval on its own domain. Tara never asks for payment passwords or card details.

Tara verifies capture, ownership, amount and currency before showing a matching receipt with the service summary, amount, references and time. Cancellation stays unpaid; refresh returns the same receipt and capture ID. All Tara payments in this entry use PayPal's sandbox, with no real charge or fulfillment. After testing, the plan is to connect Tara to Ability Bazaar's normal PayPal ordering system. The marketplace's separate normal checkout remains unchanged today.

For unpublished pricing or custom promises, Tara prepares a question in the existing contact form. The visitor reviews and submits it themselves. A useful conversation can end with a human response instead of a forced sale.

AI assists; the customer stays in control

Gemini interprets requests against the packaged catalogue and relevant public-page context. Code retains customer wording and controls price and payment state. Python/Flask, JavaScript, Cloud Run and Firestore support the hosted flow. Aoede provides prepared greeting/recovery audio and streamed speech. Browser recognition and fallback transcription support voice. Quotas, origin/CSRF checks, review expiry, ownership checks and idempotency constrain actions. The MIT standalone source supports local setup without Firestore.

What we verified and learned

Claude's independent reviews reproduced dropped requirements and restart-sensitive payments, then confirmed those original defects were fixed. Its final review informed further corrections to contact extraction, follow-up questions, summary editing and request routing.

A synthetic evaluation on release 3.9.0 covered 60 journeys and 66 chat turns, retaining every tested customer message and all nine detailed bakery briefs. Generated chat responses had a 2.16-second median and 2.42-second 90th percentile, excluding recognition and speech startup. These are engineering checks, not representative-user or accessibility certification results.

An actual hosted sandbox approval, capture, detailed receipt and refresh were recorded. A read-only seller API check matched one completed USD 500 capture, its reference, amount, item and time. Restart and capture-reconciliation paths also have regression coverage. These engineering checks are now supplemented by one recorded user demonstration described below. Broader representative-user, assistive-technology and device testing remain further validation steps; no conversion or employment gains are claimed.

The main 2:57 demo film's checkout footage was recorded on release 3.9.1; the judged 3.9.3 build adds the editable PayPal summary, which now includes every requested item in this example.

The main demo film uses actual app footage with an illustrative customer and revoiced dialogue. It shows the customer journey without presenting a real-user testimonial or a live microphone-input test.

Optional supporting evidence: Nagulan using TARA with a screen reader

The main 2:57 demo above remains the primary submission video. This optional 7:39 recording adds one real user's demonstration: Nagulan, a visually impaired screen-reader user, explores the apps, describes a five-page music-store website, reviews the request, proceeds through PayPal test checkout and reaches the displayed test receipt.

Watch the supporting recording with English captions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kb1tYjes_g

Shared with permission. The original pace and interactions are retained; personal, account and transaction details are obscured, and short passages containing spoken private details are muted. This is one recorded demonstration, not a comprehensive accessibility study. It provides additional evidence of voice and screen-reader use without establishing that every task or assistive-technology setup is accessible.

New work and purpose

Ability Bazaar and Maya/Saarthi predate this entry. Tara's conversational catalogue, faithful editable briefs, voice controls and isolated sandbox commerce are new November 2026 work. Ram Raju represents Vision-Aid. ChatGPT/Codex assisted development and production; Claude supplied independent reviews.

Our goal is a platform by persons with disabilities, for persons with disabilities, welcoming everyone. Tara helps connect a person's own words with a useful next step, with accessibility first and people in control.