The backend for the AgriSpeak forecast voice application.

AgriSpeak allows users to call a phone number and receive rainfall forecast information. The following features are supported:

• 24 hour rainfall forecast
• Information about the previous day's rainfall
• Estimated remaining duration of current rainfall
• Multiple languages
• User feedback system
• Extreme weather warning

When a user calls a number that uses AgriSpeak, they are presented four options:

1. Get information about the rainfall in the past 24 hours.
2. Get information about the rainfall in the next 24 hours.
3. Get the duration of the current rainfall, if there is any. This was found to be an important factor since rainfall often lasts for long periods at a time, as noted by our contact person.
4. Submit feedback through voice.

Operators can log into the admin panel to listen to the feedback submitted through option 4 and delete them once they are processed.

You will need:

• A weatherapi.com account with a generated API key.
• An Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2 or similar file storage solution.
• A running PostgreSQL instance.

First, create a virtual environment using the command below:

python3 -m venv .venv

Then activate it:

. .venv/bin/activate

Install the required dependencies into the virtual environment:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

The application requires multiple environment variables to be set in order to function properly. Make a copy of .env.template and name it .env and add your values. The table below explains what the environment variable values mean. All are required.

Run the database migrations to make your Postgres instance ready for running AgriSpeak.

python3 manage.py migrate

If the environment variables were correctly set, and the instance is running, then the above will perform all the required migrations on the database. This will create the required tables for AgriSpeak to function.

The below command will run the server on the default port and IP.

python3 manage.py runserver

The API exposes one endpoint that returns the main VXML file. To view it, make a GET request to http://<host>:<port>/forecast. This will redirect you to the English version of the service.

Other languages

Navigate to http://<host>:<port>/<lang>/forecast to retrieve the VXML file in other languages, where <lang> is the requested language. Please consult the below table for which value to use in place of <lang>:

Submitting feedback

In a call flow where the caller types '4', indicating they want to submit feedback, their recorded feedback will be sent to the service with a POST request to http://<host>:<port>/<lang>/feedback. In this case, <lang> is determined by the original language of their call. For example, if the user called a number that used the VXML pointing to http://<host>:<port>/en/forecast, then their feedback is submitted to http://<host>:<port>/en/feedback.

If you want to test this endpoint manually, make a POST request to http://<host>:<port>/<lang>/feedback with a wav file attached under the msg body parameter.

Viewing and deleting feedback

Visit http://<host>:<port>/ to reach the admin panel where, after logging in, you can see all the submitted feedbacks and their languages, play back the audio, and delete them if they have been processed.

Note: You need to have an admin account to login here. To create one, run the following:

python manage.py createsuperuser

Errors

When attempting to retrieve forecast information at the /forecast endpoint, the following errors can occur: