Yes. A cocoa-sector partner can join the two-week AgriVoice pilot by recruiting 20 to 50 Asante-Twi-speaking cocoa farmers, appointing one extension officer to own escalations, and agreeing to measure every answer for safety, understanding and repeat use. The pilot is a controlled learning exercise, designed to show where voice guidance helps and where a farmer needs a person.
Confirm the pilot prerequisites before recruitment
AgriVoice receives a farmer’s voice question, selects from reviewed cocoa guidance, returns spoken Asante Twi, and sends uncertain or safety-sensitive cases to a named human. The system does not create new agronomy advice during a conversation.
Before inviting farmers, the partner and Neuralis need four operational pieces in place:
- A partner contact who can coordinate the cohort and field schedule.
- One named extension officer who receives escalations and can respond within one working day.
- Reviewed, spoken Asante Twi guidance for the approved cocoa topics.
- A working WhatsApp message route, including consent and deletion behaviour that staff have tested.
Chemical guidance has an extra safeguard. Questions that require a product dosage, re-entry interval or pre-harvest interval remain with a human until a Ghanaian agronomist has verified the relevant instruction. This is deliberate. The pesticide detail that stops AgriVoice from answering explains why a careful refusal protects farmers, workers and crops.
Recruit a cohort that can reveal real use
Choose 20 to 50 farmers who speak or comfortably understand Asante Twi and who are willing to use WhatsApp voice notes during the two-week period. Recruit across the questions an extension team actually hears, rather than selecting only confident phone users or only farmers already close to a demonstration plot.
A useful cohort can include farmers with different farm sizes, varying smartphone familiarity, and people likely to ask about pod marks, pruning, disease symptoms, timing, inputs or farm records. Explain that AgriVoice provides reviewed guidance for covered questions and may route a question to an extension officer. It should never be presented as a substitute for the partner’s agronomy team.
Keep recruitment practical. Record the farmer’s consent, their preferred contact number, and whether they are comfortable sending a voice note in Twi. Give each participant a short explanation of what happens after a question: they receive a voice response when the topic is covered; otherwise, the question goes into an escalation queue.
Ask participants to use their own words. Real field phrasing, code-switching and noisy recordings are valuable evidence. A pilot built only around rehearsed questions can hide the exact failures that matter once farmers rely on the service.
Name one escalation owner with a clear working routine
The escalation owner is the operational backbone of the pilot. Give this person a defined handoff process before the first farmer message arrives.
They need to know which questions require follow-up, where to see the queue, how to contact the farmer, and what response time the partner can maintain. The pilot target is a median escalation response in less than one working day. If the extension officer is away, name a backup before recruitment begins.
Set a simple daily routine. Review new escalations at an agreed time, mark each one as answered or still pending, and capture the outcome. A short answer by voice or phone may be more useful than a long written reply, especially when the original question arrived as a voice note.
The partner should also agree how to handle questions outside the approved guidance. A prompt escalation is a successful outcome when the system lacks a safe answer. A confident response built on missing information is not.
Measure safety before convenience
The first pilot measure is safe-answer performance. Every farmer question should be classified as answered from reviewed content, correctly escalated, or needing investigation.
The continue signal is at least 70% of questions answered or correctly escalated, with zero unsafe pesticide answers. Any unreviewed or unsafe instruction reaching a farmer requires immediate review of the content, selection path and escalation process.
Keep an incident record even when the service declines to answer. Record the question category, the response or escalation, the time taken, and whether the farmer received a useful next step. This makes it possible to distinguish a healthy safeguard from a frustrating dead end.
Check whether farmers understood the voice response
A response that arrives quickly still fails if the farmer cannot understand it. After a sample of interactions, ask a short follow-up: “Did you understand the response?” Then ask the farmer to say what they believe they should do next.
The pilot target is that at least 80% of participants report understanding the response. Note whether difficulty came from audio quality, vocabulary, speed, an English loanword, the formal sound of the voice, or a question that needed a person. These details are more useful than a single satisfaction score.
Measure end-to-end response time as well. The target is a median response below eight seconds, excluding human escalation. Longer waits can break a voice conversation, particularly when a farmer is standing in a field with limited signal.
Look for repeat use in week two
Novelty can make a first interaction look stronger than it is. Track how many activated farmers ask another question during the second week. The pilot’s continue signal is repeat use from at least 30% of activated farmers.
Review repeat use alongside question quality. A farmer who returns with a new, relevant question may indicate trust and usefulness. A farmer who repeats the same request because the first response was unclear points to a product or content problem.
Set the next action before the pilot starts
Assign the partner coordinator and named extension officer, then choose a recruitment window for 20 to 50 eligible farmers. Before the first invitation goes out, run one staff rehearsal from voice question through response or escalation, and write down who owns the queue the next working day.
Comments
No comments yet.