From Midnight Power Cuts to Multi-Agent Voice AI: How I Built Raksha in 10 Days

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 India's digital payments ecosystem is scaling at lightspeed, but so is financial fraud. Every day, people receive panic-inducing SMS messages claiming: "Your bank account is blocked. Update KYC immediately or share OTP." When someone is panicked, reading a 5-page PDF advisory is the last thing they will do. They need immediate, reassuring spoken advice in accessible Hinglish: "Ghabraiye mat. Bank kabhi phone ya message par OTP nahi mangta. Yeh poori tarah fraud hai." Voice is the most natural medium for this. If an AI agent can step in during those critical first 60 seconds, it can prevent immediate financial loss. 2. The 10-Day Journey: Power Cuts, Audio Hacks & Architecture Days 1–3: The Rocky Start & The Audio Hack Day 1 was pure chaos. I was battling 404s and gRPC hanging issues while connecting Gemini and LiveKit. Exactly 16 minutes before the midnight deadline, the power cut out completely. When it returned a minute past midnight, my desktop greeted me with a blue SrtTrail.txt Windows repair screen—and then another storm knocked the grid out again. I thought I was out on Day 1, b