Building FinSaathi: A Voice-First AI Financial Assistant with LiveKit and Murf

Building FinSaathi: A Voice-First AI Financial Assistant Financial information can be difficult to understand. Banking terms, loans, credit scores, payments, and other financial decisions can quickly become overwhelming when users have to navigate everything through forms and complicated interfaces. So I wanted to explore a simpler interaction: What if financial guidance could start with a conversation? That idea became FinSaathi , a voice-first AI financial assistant. What I Built The first goal was simple: get a real-time voice assistant working end-to-end and deploy it. The current architecture is: Next.js Frontend → LiveKit → Python AI Agent → Voice/AI Services The frontend is deployed on Vercel, while the LiveKit agent is deployed on Railway. Users can open the application, start a conversation, and interact with the FinSaathi agent through voice. The Tech Stack Frontend Next.js React TypeScript LiveKit Components Tailwind CSS Vercel Backend Python LiveKit Agents UV Docker Railway Voice / AI LiveKit Murf AI/LLM services Data SQLite for application memory and call-related data The Part That Took More Time Than Expected Getting the agent to work locally was relatively straightforward. Getting the same system to actually run in production was a different problem. The Railway deployment initially failed with: python: can't open file '//src/agent.py': [Errno 2] No such file or directory The problem turned out to be related to how the application path and startup command were being handled inside the Docker deployment. After fixing the container and Railway startup configuration, the deployment moved further — and exposed another issue. Because the container runs the application as a non-root user, UV initially could not create its cache directory: Permission denied: '/app/.cache/uv' Fixing the permissions allowed the actual LiveKit AgentServer to start successfully. The production logs then showed the agent listening for connections and registering its worker with L