Baato

Inspiration

In Hindi, "Baato" is the plural of the word "Baat," which means talk, conversation, or words.

As an immigrant, most of my time with extended family has been few and far between. Aside from a handful of deep conversations—often prompted by the right questions—our connections have largely centered around major life events.

While part of a writers’ club in California, an aunt I’d only met twice released an autobiography. It opened up a whole new perspective on our family. Her book inspired other family members to share their own stories and uncover long-forgotten memories.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the skills of a professional interviewer—or the time to sit with each family member in person. Many of them aren’t interested in writing lengthy autobiographies, and hiring a professional interviewer often costs thousands of dollars.

The idea for Baato was born from my curiosity about my family’s past—whether it was grandparents, or cousins across the world.

What it does

Baato is leveraging AI to conduct guided interviews and record deep memories of loved ones that can last in the family forever. Without the constraints of time, location and cost of a professional interviewer, Baato will help users share their personal life stories and deepen connections with other family members.

How we built it

Baato was built leveraging only Bolt.new and Tavus. With Tavus, I focused on creating and training a replica that could lead warm, thoughtful interviews. Then I used Bolt to design the UI, build the process, and integrate it with Tavus. With some guidance and a lot of iteration, I created an integrated platform—entirely with just these two tools.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we worked on was crafting a AI that could build a conversation and create a trusted connection with a human being. With some of the instructions we gave, the AI would use the same set of instructions across the interview. I refined the process to avoid repetitive behavior, leading to deeper insights and better responses.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a non-developer, I was really dreading the API connection between platforms. I thought I'd have to do manual work to share the interview process part with clients. With some debugging, the API connection process was relatively simple and turned out better than I thought it would.

What we learned

1) It's essential to break the AI’s instructions into distinct stages and apply clear guardrails to avoid off-topic or irrelevant questions 2) Bolt's documentation and capabilities are so simple and easy to deal with.

What's next for Baato

We're focused on delivering this experience to users and refining the replica to create the best interviews possible. We plan to evolve Baato into a monthly subscription model, offering short recurring interviews that surface new memories and strengthen family connections over time. We also aim to expand AI capabilities to support multiple languages—so people around the world can preserve their stories and stay connected.

Built With

• bolt.new
• tavus