FINWISE: An Accessible Financial Platform for Small-scale Workers using a Voice enabled Chatbot

In the digital economy of today, financial services are increasingly available through online platforms and mobile applications. However, a significant part of the population, particularly small-scale workers and people with limited means, continues to encounter problems obtaining financial literacy tools via linguistic, technological, and usability barriers. FinWise is a lightweight voice-enabled chatbot that aims to address the digital divide and can offer basic financial advice in English using both voice and text. This platform is an initial step towards digital financial inclusion by better accessing basic information around savings, budgeting, and investment awareness. The FinWise platform is built with a Django backend with STT (speech to text) and TTS (text to speech) integrated modules, and operates as a conversation with a voice-enabled user interface that is accessible to users with limited competences in reading and typing. Unlike heavily resource-dependent, trained AI systems that require large amounts of training data, FinWise operates in a rule-based structure with the expectation of quick, consistent, and offline- based responses. This paper explores the system architecture and design decisions, and the evaluation results and future potential to scale the solution up to broader financial inclusion scenarios.