When floodwaters rise or infrastructure fails, screens become useless. Your hands might be full, your phone screen might be wet, or you might simply be in a state of panic. In these critical seconds, typing is a barrier. Talking is an instinct.
For the past 10 days, I participated in the 10 Days of Voice Agents — VoiceForBharat Edition challenge. My goal? To build Raksha—an AI-powered emergency voice assistant that doesn't just chat, but actively triages disasters, fetches live hazard data, and dispatches human rescue teams.
Here is the story of how Raksha evolved from a simple text prompt into a multi-agent, SIP-calling rescue coordinator, the engineering roadblocks I hit, and how you can build one yourself.
To build a voice agent that feels human, latency must be virtually zero. If a caller in danger has to wait 3 seconds for a response, trust is lost immediately. I orchestrated four core technologies using the LiveKit framework to achieve sub-second response times:
The Ears (STT): Deepgram Nova-3. Configured to language="multi", it flawlessly captures the code-mixed "Hinglish" spoken across India, even when the caller is speaking frantically.
