Venture · 02
Saathi
A voice companion for your parents. It speaks their language, listens without hurry, and never asks them to type.
Spec
- Status
- Live beta
- Try it
- heysaathi.vercel.app
- Languages
- Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi, English
- Stack
- Sarvam speech recognition, Claude
01
Millions of elderly Indians live alone while their children work abroad. The phone in their hand assumes young eyes, fast thumbs and English. Video calls happen on Sunday. The other six days are quiet.
Saathi is a companion that talks. In Malayalam, in Telugu, about the old films they love, the news, their medicines, their day. No login, no password, no keyboard. The son in New Jersey sets it up with a pairing code, and the mother in Kochi just speaks.
02
What I sweat over
01
Voice first, screen second
The whole interface is a conversation. The screen exists to reassure, not to navigate. Anything that needs a tap is a large, obvious button with one job.
02
Understanding grandma, not transcribing her
Speech recognition for elderly regional voices is hard, so I benchmarked five providers on real elderly Kerala speech. The metric that matters is not word error rate, it is whether the system caught medicine, temple and grandson. Keyword recall over transcription vanity.
03
Setup happens an ocean away
The elder never onboards. Three screens: pick a language, read a pairing code to your child on the phone, done. The family configures everything else remotely.
04
Type you can read from across the room
Every screen is designed for seventy year old eyes. If a line of text cannot be read at arm's length without glasses, it does not ship.
03
Screens
Know someone who needs this?
Try it with your parents.
It is free while in beta. I want to hear what confused them, that is the whole roadmap.
heysaathi.vercel.app