Digital Green, wants to support its smallholder Chilli farmers in Andhra Pradesh on the prevention and cure of a specific pest that frequently infests the crop during the cropping cycle. They plan to do this by sending a timely advisory to the farmers using a bot that runs over Whatsapp. To ease the 2-way communication with the farmers they wish to have most of these conversations over voice with text support as a fallback.

Glific has extensive features to communicate with beneficiaries with text-based communication. Glific team proposed to build the voice-based chatbot using Glific. Digital Green has as service provider NavanaTech which provides a voice-to-text API, which works in different languages.
DG team along with their design & research partner Navana CoLab created the flows, which were very descriptive in text format, and share them with us to build the chat communications. The requirements were given in such a clear way, that it was easy to kick start the work. Additionally, Navana CoLab and Digital Green created flowcharts as per the communication flows they want using whimsical.

Now the key part is to integrate with NavanaTech to send the voice messages received in Glific and receive the codes which NavanaTech will generate by decrypting the voice notes. Glific team has extended the system to build back-end functionality to do the integration.

Glific team created all the chat flow communication in the text format and later started adding functions to send the voice notes to voice decryption software and get a code (in Text) as a response. Read the valid response in a text format and use that in a communication flow to send the relevant messages to the beneficiaries as per the requirement of the Digital Green.

Glific Chat Screen

Whats APP Screen Shot

Glific team is also extending the system to handle the specific requirements of the user case like executing the communication with farmers again at a specific time gap or, send relevant messages on the basis of the number of times farmers respond and use-cases, what to do when farmers don’t respond. Glific team is building functions to support all these use-cases for Digital Green chatbot.

It is very exciting to see how things are coming up with this project. Working closely with Ditial green team and touching base on the progress on weekly basis helps us to keep the project on track.

Currently, we are working on the last leg of the solution and hope to make it LIVE in mid of July. Quite excited to launch and see the response of the voice-based chatbot.