This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Build with Gemma 4
What I Built
A while back I was watching a documentary about disaster response teams during a major earthquake. What struck me wasn't only the destruction — it was also the communication breakdown. Cell networks were gone. And while voice radios were still working, they weren't enough.
Here's the thing about voice radio in a large-scale disaster: it works, until it doesn't. Twenty field teams radioing in simultaneously saturate the channel. Critical details get lost — wrong street names, garbled injury counts, conflicting reports about the same location. Every message requires a human on the other end to listen, interpret, and manually log what was said. And none of it can be automatically parsed, prioritized, or routed to the right team. A coordinator drowning in voice traffic can't act fast enough.
There's also a harder problem: some of the most capable mesh networks used in disaster response — LoRa and Meshtastic — are data-only. They don't carry voice at all. They exist specifically to move small packets of structured data across long distances with minimal power. They're incredibly robust in disaster conditions. But they cap at around 228 bytes per packet. You can't send an image over them. You can barely send a sentence.
