This blog has been long pending. Infact, I took part in GSoC 2014 and GSoC 2015 application process has already started. But I’ll share my experience anyway.

I interned with Raxa. They are into building web and mobile applications to help small clinics and hospitals go online. Their applications are build on top of the OpenMRS platform. Raxa was fully open source earlier but have moved to a hybrid model presently. All the GSoC projects are open source and available through GitHub.

I started late in the application process. I didn’t have specific plans for applying to GSoC this time. The list of organizations had been announced and application deadline was pretty close. One fine day, I thought I’ll just glance over the organizations that have been accepted and see if there are any that meets my areas of expertise. Raxa was planning to enable patients without smart phones to access their medical services using phone calls via IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and via SMS. This required knowledge of an open source telephony server called Asterisk. I had spend a decent chunk of my third year working on a social initiative/startup called Dial Blood which was built on Asterisk. Much of my final year was spend working on Findauto which was an SMS based auto rickshaw booking startup. Hence it made a lot of sense for me to apply for this project.

My application emphasized on why I’m the right person to work on this project and contained a week-by-week systematic and clear breakdown of how I’ll go about completing the project. The key features I proposed to enable were:

• Appointment scheduling via SMS or call
• Calling/submitting queries to doctors

One feedback I got on my application was that there was scope for more to be done in three months. They wanted to make sure I was productivity engaged through out the three months with additional tasks to take up if I manage to finish these early. IVR can be at times seem complicated to the rural audience Raxa was primarily trying to appeal to. Hence instead of asking people to press digits (press 1 for English, 2 for Hindi..), I thought of using voice recognition and natural language processing to hear their response and act accordingly. The inclusion of this task made my application reasonably strong.

I applied only to Raxa and thankfully made it when the results came out. They had selected four interns – one girl from Srilanka, one IIT Delhi grad who had previously interned with them outside GSoC and another student who was pursuing his masters degree in computer science, apart from me. They all were working on really interesting projects which included mobile application development to machine learning. More details can be found here.

We also used to have weekly meetings with the whole Raxa team. Our progress was evaluated each week. I was assigned a mentor. I could reach out to him anytime for any assistance. My project was a continuation of last year’s GSoC project. I had some difficulty in the code ramp up because of limited documentation. Apart from that, Asterisk part went smoothly. For the voice recognition part, I was planning to use Google’s voice recognition APIs. But Google had deprecated the free version by then. Other popular alternatives like Spinx had limitations working with Asterisk because of some frequency mismatch issues. This was a blocker for me. My mentor helped me identify a NLP startup (Wit.AI) working in this domain. They had really powerful APIs available for free. I used those in my GSoC project and managed to implement the feature successfully.

Another main task that I did was research on what’s the best way to take the service into production. Various options including Amazon EC2, own servers and third party services were explored. I also contacted various telephony service providers to inquire about PRI lines and their pricing. We were not able to take the service into production because of some constraints Raxa had. But I was code complete and production ready by end of summer.

We had a final demo day where all 4 of us presented our projects. We all managed to complete GSoC successfully. It was a really good experience for me to work on such a big project end to end under strict time constraints. Not to mention the stipend and awesome goodies.. 🙂

My GSoC project code link – https://github.com/Raxa/voice/tree/master/Asterisk

Wiki link – https://raxaemr.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=50724873

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