← All work
2024
Offline SMS AI Chatbot
Conversational AI reachable from any phone that can send a text, with no data connection required.
- Lead full-stack developer
- 2024
A chatbot that lets someone with a basic feature phone and no data plan hold a conversation with an AI model over plain SMS. The Africa’s Talking gateway handles delivery, a FastAPI backend manages session state between texts, and the model handles inference, so the internet connection requirement drops out of the equation.
The hard parts were reliable delivery through a third-party SMS gateway, holding conversational state across messages that arrive minutes apart, and keeping payloads inside SMS limits.