Hindi mein bolo.Online dukaan banao.

Awaaz is a voice-first tool that lets an Indian kirana (neighbourhood grocery) shop owner create a live online storefront by speaking in Hindi for about 60 seconds. The owner talks, the AI listens, and the storefront builds itself — with WhatsApp ordering, UPI payments, and an embedded map. There is no typing, no product catalog to structure, and no dashboard to manage.

By Raj Sajnani, Founder · Published 26 May 2026

Why does Awaaz exist?

India has roughly 40 million kirana stores, and a large share of them already take orders on WhatsApp and accept UPI payments. Yet almost none of them have a website, because every existing store builder assumes the owner can type fast, structure a product catalog, choose a layout, and manage a dashboard. Awaaz removes all four assumptions by matching what a shopkeeper already does every day: have a conversation.

How does Awaaz work?

A merchant registers with their WhatsApp number using phone OTP, taps the record button, and describes their shop in plain Hindi. Awaaz then turns that single spoken pass into a complete, reviewable storefront in five steps:

1. The merchant speaks for about 60 seconds — shop name, address, opening hours, products, and prices.
2. OpenAI Whisper transcribes the Hindi audio into text.
3. A second model extracts structured fields into a strict JSON schema, with a confidence score and a list of missing fields.
4. The owner reviews and edits the result, then publishes a storefront at a clean URL based on the shop name.
5. Customers add items to a cart, send the order on WhatsApp, and pay with the shop's UPI QR code.

What does an Awaaz storefront include?

Every published store is mobile-first and ready to sell immediately. On the Free Forever plan a merchant gets a single live storefront at no cost, and each store includes:

• Voice-based creation and editing in Hindi or English.
• WhatsApp ordering tied to the merchant's registered number.
• A UPI QR code for payments.
• An embedded Google Map with the exact shop location.
• Pickup or delivery options, and unlimited products.

Which languages does Awaaz support?

Awaaz supports Hindi and English today. Eight more Indian languages — Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Malayalam — are planned, because roughly 90% of the target merchants reach the internet primarily on a mobile phone in their own language rather than in English.

How was Awaaz built?

Awaaz was built as a hackathon project for the Outskill AI program. The product was developed almost entirely through AI pair-programming: more than 41 OpenAI Codex sessions handled the planning, coding, debugging, refactoring, and testing, with each session documented in a Codex log that records the prompt, the change, and the files touched. The hardest single stretch was a two-day migration of merchant login from Supabase phone OTP to Firebase Phone Auth, which involved debugging five distinct console errors.

The product runs on Next.js 15 (App Router) with Supabase (Postgres and storage) for data, Firebase Phone Auth for verification, OpenAI for both Whisper transcription and structured extraction, and the Google Places and Maps APIs for addresses and the storefront map.

Who is Awaaz for?

Awaaz is for the non-technical local shop owner who can talk but does not want to type, fill forms, or learn a dashboard. The first 60 seconds of speaking carry the entire onboarding, so a merchant who has never built a website can publish a working online store in about a minute and start taking orders the same day.