Bridging Generations, Revolutionizing Housing
Inspired by a French government initiative encouraging elderly people to rent a room to a young tenant and live together, Siggi matches a host with a renter. To make this process painless, Siggi writes the contract based on the pair's requirements which they can just sign.
Importantly, Siggi doesn't just make existing housing even more competitive - it creates new opportunities, fostering intergenerational symbioses in the process.
For this year's hackaTUM, we decided to revolutionize the housing market: Siggi is an AI agent that interacts with each generation through their preferred means of communication and quickly drafts a contract to sign. This means that Siggi
- talks to hosts by phone and to the younger generation via WhatsApp,
- matches a renter to a host,
- creates a contract, sending a Docusign link to the renter and a paper copy to the host.
Siggi is comprised of 3 main parts: We used Twilio to provide a phone number and interface with the WhatsApp Business API. We used Retell AI for low-latency voice agents, providing a smooth phone call experience. And we used Python with FastAPI to piece them together and implement the matching algorithm.
While creating each component was a challenge, integrating them proved the hardest. Twilio doesn't work well with AI agents directly so we had to come up with a way to use Retell AI. Additionally, we had to start drafting the contract during the ongoing phone call to eliminate disruptive wait times.
Ultimately, the integration was a great success: Siggi provides a streamlined flow to offer and rent housing.
We learned how to use Twilio, that Twilio+Gemini is too slow, and that Retell AI is way faster. The only uncertainty we're still left with is what "elastic SIP trunking" means...
By offering an easy way for people to let empty rooms, Siggi creates housing and intergenerational friendships. The only task left is to integrate a online mailing service such as LetterStream to send the contract to the host and seal the deal, which we are excited to do in the coming week!
uvicorn main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000