Riley

Inspiration

SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being): Focuses on ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all ages. Key targets include reducing maternal and child mortality, ending epidemics of major infectious diseases, and reducing premature mortality from non-communicable diseases.

SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities): Aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. This involves ensuring access to adequate, safe, and affordable housing and basic services, improving transportation systems, enhancing urban planning, and reducing the environmental impact of cities.

The devastating LA fires and escalating global tensions reminded us that crises don't wait for business hours. When disaster strikes—whether it's fleeing flames, managing PTSD from conflict zones, or treating injuries in remote areas—people need immediate, expert guidance. Current emergency systems are overwhelmed, understaffed, and often unreachable when needed most. We built Riley to ensure no one faces a crisis alone, advancing UN SDGs 3 & 11 by providing universal healthcare access and building resilient communities that can respond to any emergency, anywhere, anytime.

What it does

Riley is an AI-powered crisis response system accessible 24/7 via phone calls. It provides specialized support across three critical areas:

Mental Health Crisis: Suicide prevention, PTSD support, panic attacks, and trauma counseling
Remote Medical Emergencies: First aid guidance, injury assessment, and medical triage for isolated locations
Disaster Evacuation: Fire, flood, earthquake response, and emergency evacuation planning

Riley remembers every caller through persistent memory tied to phone numbers, building trusted relationships across multiple interactions. Crisis management boards, insurance companies, hospitals, and emergency institutions can access the platform for better crisis coordination and resource allocation.

How we built it

Voice Infrastructure: VAPI provides low-latency, empathetic phone call handling with natural speech recognition and generation.

Memory System: Letta's multi-user architecture creates unique user profiles for each phone number, ensuring persistent context across all interactions.

Multi-Agent Architecture: Specialized Letta agents for mental health, medical emergencies, and evacuation work collaboratively while sharing user memory, reducing hallucination and improving response accuracy.

Escalation Tools: Agentic tools automatically detect high-priority situations and escalate calls to human operators when necessary.

Analytics Dashboard: Real-time crisis categorization and management interface for institutions to track patterns and optimize response strategies.

Challenges we ran into

Memory Persistence: Implementing sticky memory across phone sessions required careful user management in Letta's multi-user system.

Agent Coordination: Ensuring multiple specialized agents could share context without conflicting advice or losing conversation flow. Syncing Letta and Vapi was abit of a challenge as well.

Emergency Escalation: Building reliable triggers to identify when AI should immediately transfer to human crisis counselors.

Voice Latency: Optimizing VAPI integration to maintain empathetic, real-time conversations during high-stress situations.

Crisis Detection: Developing algorithms to accurately categorize and prioritize different types of emergencies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Universal Access: Created a system that works anywhere with phone service, eliminating geographic and infrastructure barriers to crisis support.

Persistent Relationships: Successfully implemented memory retention that allows callers to build ongoing relationships with their AI crisis specialist.

Multi-Modal Crisis Response: Built the first AI system that handles mental health, medical, and evacuation emergencies in one unified platform.

Institutional Integration: Designed scalable analytics that help crisis management organizations optimize their response strategies.

Real-Time Escalation: Implemented seamless human handoff for situations requiring immediate professional intervention.

What we learned

Crisis Communication: The importance of empathetic, non-judgmental language in emergency situations cannot be overstated.

Memory Architecture: Persistent AI relationships significantly improve trust and response effectiveness in crisis scenarios.

Multi-Agent Coordination: Specialized agents working together provide more accurate, contextual advice than single generalist models.

Scalability Matters: AI crisis response can provide insights into community risk patterns that improve overall emergency preparedness.

Human-AI Collaboration: The most effective crisis response combines AI availability with human expertise for complex situations.

What's next for Riley

Global Expansion: Deploy Riley in multiple languages and regions, partnering with international crisis response organizations.

Predictive Analytics: Use aggregated crisis data to predict and prevent community-wide emergencies before they escalate.

IoT Integration: Connect with smart home devices, medical wearables, and environmental sensors for proactive crisis detection.

Training Platform: Develop Riley as a training tool for human crisis counselors and emergency responders.

Policy Impact: Work with governments to integrate Riley into national emergency response frameworks, advancing SDGs 3 & 11 at scale.

Specialized Verticals: Create industry-specific versions for schools, workplaces, and high-risk environments like oil rigs or remote research stations.

Riley represents the future of crisis response—where help is always just a phone call away, building healthier, more resilient communities worldwide.