Nothing here is an endorsement. It is the record of what a two-person team in Karachi could get to work on a phone that cost eleven dollars — and what we abandoned.
Dialogflow
The engine that shipped. Rule-based and deterministic — hardcoded rules classifying intent, a button-led path rather than free text. Two production agents, Raaji Buttons and Raaji V2, in a cloud project called Raaji-MHM.
SHIPPED
Botsociety
Prototyping. Where a conversation was seen before it was written — quick replies, decision trees, dead ends — then exported into the engine.
USED DAILY
SmartDraw
The first conversation trees. Every branch drawn before a line of it was authored.
USED
Bitbucket
Where the code lived.
USED
Squarespace + GoDaddy
Site and domain. No custom front end, on purpose — the budget went into the conversation.
USED
Audiopedia / URIDU
Open-source audio built on rather than duplicated — roughly fifty localised bots across five languages sat on top of it.
BUILT ON
WhatsApp
The real distribution layer. Groups, voice notes, and offline video versions for villages that could not load a link. No app store in between.
THE CHANNEL
Zoom
Virtual listening parties, configured for safety first: links only to champions, waiting room on, screen share host-only.
USED
Canva
Posters, banners and certificates — made by the champions themselves, not a designer in another city.
USED
Excel & Sheets
The unglamorous spine. Every conversational unit tracked by ID against its text, plus the style guide and the content masters — a workaround for authoring tools with no search and no autosave.
THE SPINE
Rasa
Evaluated as the open-source alternative. Never adopted.
EVALUATED
CoCoHub
Evaluated. Never adopted.
EVALUATED
Chatfuel
An account was opened. Nothing can honestly be said to have shipped from it.
TRIED
MEAN stack
Specified for the V2 rebuild. Never built.
SPECCED, UNBUILT
Power BI + SurveyGizmo
The phase-one dashboard plan. A plan, not a deployment.
PLANNED
Completion-rate tracking
Written into the V2 build brief — half a flow completed should read fifty per cent. Scoped on a small contractor budget; no evidence it was delivered.
SPECCED, UNBUILT
Smart feature phones
Not software — the constraint. Under eleven dollars, low bandwidth, shared between sisters. Every decision answered to that device.
THE LIMIT
The honest gap. Nothing on this list is an LLM tool. Raaji ended before the current generation arrived — no Voiceflow, no Lex, no agent evaluation stack. What shipped was deliberately narrow: rules, buttons, and pre-approved answers. What transferred was never the platform — it was the flow logic, the refusal to free-generate on a sensitive subject, and knowing the difference between a question a machine may answer and one it may not.