Building FinSaathi: A Voice-First Financial Assistant for Bharat 🇮🇳 10 Days of Voice Agents — VoiceForBharat Edition

Over the last 10 days, I built FinSaathi, a voice-first AI assistant for the Financial Services track of the VoiceForBharat challenge. The goal was simple: build an assistant that can talk naturally with users, understand financial and government-scheme related queries, remember relevant information, use tools, and know when a human or specialist should take over. What started as a basic voice agent gradually became a complete system with memory, tools, outbound calling, human escalation, call analytics, and specialist-agent handoffs. 💡 The Problem Financial and government-scheme processes can involve eligibility requirements, documents, deadlines, and complicated terminology. For users who are more comfortable speaking than typing, voice can make these interactions much more natural. For example, a user can simply ask: "PMJJBY ke liye main eligible hoon?" Instead of navigating through multiple forms, FinSaathi can understand the request, collect the required information, perform an eligibility check, and explain the result conversationally. The goal is not to replace banks or human support, but to provide a conversational first layer of assistance and escalate situations when human help is required. 🏗️ Architecture USER │ ▼ LiveKit │ ▼ Speech-to-Text │ ▼ LLM / Agent │ ┌────────────┼────────────┐ ▼ ▼ ▼ Memory Tools Escalation │ │ │ └────────────┼────────────┘ ▼ SQLite DB │ ┌──────┴──────┐ ▼ ▼ Human Support Analytics Dashboard Dashboard │ ▼ Murf Falcon │ ▼ USER Technology Stack Component Technology Frontend Next.js / React AI Agent LiveKit Agents Real-time Transport LiveKit Text-to-Speech Murf Falcon Backend Python API FastAPI Database SQLite Calling SIP / LiveKit 🎙️ Key Features Indian Voice & Natural Conversations FinSaathi uses Murf Falcon for text-to-speech and supports natural Hindi/Hinglish conversations. The goal was to make the interaction feel more like talking to an assistant rather than interacting with a traditional chatbot. Safety Guardrails Financial co