IMBIshimwe Mugisha Benjamin

Case study · 07 / 10

Tello AI

A small language model that turns plain speech into the right USSD code, on device.

Organisation
Personal project
Role
ML engineer
When
Small language model
Tello AI interface turning a spoken request into a USSD code
Tello AI, public site

Context

USSD menus are how many people in Rwanda pay, top up and check balances. Remembering codes is hard. Asking in your own words is not.

What I built

  1. 01Fine tuned a small language model on USSD tasks with Unsloth and supervised fine tuning.
  2. 02Quantised it to run on device with llama.cpp.
  3. 03Voice and text input mapped to the correct code for the task.

Outcome

  • Runs locally, no server round trip for a code lookup.

Tools

  • Hugging Face
  • Unsloth
  • llama.cpp
  • Python