Voice-first support agent for low-resource West African customer-service settings, with local ASR, hybrid retrieval, grounded answers, and confidence-aware escalation.
# West Africa Voice Support Agent
A production-minded voice support agent for low-resource customer support scenarios in West Africa.
This project demonstrates how to build a safer, grounded support workflow that accepts audio or text, retrieves evidence from a support knowledge base, generates concise responses, and escalates risky or unsupported cases to a human agent.
## Why this project matters
Many customer support environments in African markets operate under constraints that are often missing from mainstream AI demos:
- multilingual and code-switched user input
- noisy audio conditions
- informal phrasing and spelling variation
- low-bandwidth or unstable connectivity
- trust-sensitive financial and account-related issues
- limited tolerance for unsupported or risky responses
This repo is a focused demonstration of how to design a support assistant for that setting.
## What this project shows
This system implements a narrow but realistic support pipeline:
1. Accept voice or text input
2. Transcribe audio locally
3. Normalize the user query
4. Retrieve relevant support documents
5. Generate a response grounded in retrieved evidence
6. Estimate confidence and detect risky cases
7. Either return an evidence-backed answer or recommend escalation
The goal is not open-ended chatting. The goal is reliable support behavior in settings where grounding, fallback logic, and escalation matter.
## Current evaluation snapshot
- **Top-1 retrieval accuracy:** 83.3%
- **Evidence recall@3:** 100.0%
- **Average gold coverage:** 84.7%
- **Escalation accuracy:** 75.0%
- **Average confidence:** 0.771
- **Unsupported answers:** 0
## Example supported intents
- send money failed
- cash-out issue
- account locked
- wrong recipient
- KYC / identity verification help
## Core features
- **Voice and text support**
- **Local offline transcription with `faster-whisper`**
- **Hybrid retrieval**
- domain-aware lexical retrieval
- TF-IDF retrieval
- hybrid reranking
- **Ground …