Building voice AI sounds deceptively clean on paper: capture speech, stream it to an STT engine, prompt an LLM, and synthesize audio back in real time.
In reality, building a real-time, multilingual voice assistant that handles high-stress banking fraud while running on desktop hardware in 30°C heat with unstable power is a completely different story.
As a Class 12 student diving into my first-ever hackathon, I spent the last 10 days of the #VoiceForBharat Challenge building Raksha—an empathetic, multi-agent voice assistant designed to protect Indian citizens from cyber scams, verify official government schemes, and escalate active financial fraud to human coordinators.
Here is the honest breakdown of how Raksha evolved from Day 1 to Day 10, the absurd hurdles along the way, and what it actually takes to build reliable voice systems.
1. The Core Problem: Panic & Digital Banking Scams
