Helo BusKL

Created by team Mosquito can fly on September 29, 2026

Helo BusKL lets anyone in the Klang Valley ask the bus, out loud. Prasarana carried 1.31 million passengers a day in 2025, yet using a bus still means knowing official Malay stop names and reading a map app. That leaves out many elderly and visually impaired riders, visitors, and anyone with their hands full at a bus stop. With Helo BusKL you just talk. Say "I'm at Kolej Kediaman Kesepuluh, when's my bus?" or "How do I get from KL Sentral to Pasar Seni?" and it: - finds your stop from how you say it: official names, English versions, landmarks like "Chinatown", or your location - gives live arrival times computed from real-time RapidKL bus GPS positions - plans trips across buses, MRT/LRT and walkways, drawn on a live map - alerts you when your bus is 5 minutes away Built on the AssemblyAI Voice Agent API: a stored agent with 100 boosted KL stop names and six HTTP tools that AssemblyAI calls directly on a FastAPI server, which reads Prasarana's open GTFS feeds from data.gov.my. No tool dispatcher and no server WebSockets. The hard part was Malaysia, not the voice. It adds a local language layer (aliases, English-to-Malay rules, sound-alike matching, nearby-stop fallback) so misheard Malay names still work, and computes ETAs itself because the feed only publishes bus positions. Measured on 56 test queries including 14 mishearings: right stop first 80% of the time, top 3 85%, median answer 0.5 s. Unlike a map app, every question also becomes demand data: an Insights page shows operators the most-asked stops and the trips riders want that have no direct route. Next: Bahasa Melayu and Chinese, and a phone hotline for riders without smartphones. Try it: helo-bus.onrender.com

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