TeamTalk

Accessing healthcare, emergency assistance and public information increasingly requires a smartphone, reliable internet, digital literacy and the ability to navigate screens. This excludes people who cannot meet these requirements. In Nigeria, many community hospitals still rely on paper records and physical visits to manage appointments, enquiries and patient follow-ups. Some lack even basic computers and internet connectivity. Patients must travel just to request appointments or obtain information, while healthcare workers struggle to coordinate services. I experienced this problem when a friend was bitten by a snake in a remote village. We could not reach an emergency service or readily obtain guidance. It showed me that having a telephone does not necessarily mean having access to the assistance needed. The barriers are particularly significant for people with disabilities, older adults, people with limited literacy and critically ill patients. Our Solution We built Talk on the belief that AI should break the digital divide, not deepen it. Talk turns the telephone number people already use into an access point for essential services. Through ordinary phone calls, people can communicate their needs without downloading an application, owning a smartphone or navigating digital interfaces. Behind this familiar interface is an AI-powered orchestration layer that understands requests, maintains context, retrieves approved information and coordinates workflows involving institutions and human personnel. In healthcare, Talk supports appointment coordination, patient enquiries, access to approved health information, follow-ups and escalation to healthcare workers. The same architecture can extend to government services and other essential resources. Deployment and Impact We have received Letters of Intent from two community hospitals interested in deploying Talk. During these engagements, we discovered that they lack computers to adequately organize and coordinate their workflows. Our deployment approach therefore combines basic computing and internet infrastructure, organization of existing institutional information, and AI-enabled coordination of patient requests and administrative workflows. Healthcare professionals retain responsibility for clinical decisions. Why This Support Matters Making Talk useful in underserved communities requires more than software or API access. It requires computers, connectivity, organized information and staff preparation to establish the foundations for responsible AI deployment. We intend to use this support to address these infrastructure gaps while deploying and validating Talk with our prospective hospital partners. Our ambition is to make essential services accessible regardless of a person's location, literacy, physical condition or access to conventional digital infrastructure.