A cocoa-sector institution should be able to audit every unresolved farmer question: who received it, how long the response took, and whether the farmer ultimately received safe guidance. Neuralis is inviting one partner to test that standard with 20 to 50 Asante-Twi-speaking cocoa farmers over two weeks.
In April 1970, Apollo 13 was losing oxygen on its way to the Moon. Flight director Gene Kranz and the Mission Control team in Houston could not rely on reassuring guesses. Each problem had to reach the right specialists, decisions had to be tracked, and the crew needed instructions grounded in what engineers had verified.
One danger came from rising carbon dioxide. The Command Module had square lithium hydroxide canisters, while the Lunar Module used round openings. NASA engineers developed an adapter using materials available aboard the spacecraft, then Mission Control relayed the procedure to the crew. NASA’s Apollo 13 mission history documents how coordinated ground teams worked through that and other failures before the astronauts returned safely to Earth.
A farmer’s unresolved cocoa question carries smaller stakes, but the operating principle is the same. When a system lacks a verified answer, responsibility must move to a named person. The question cannot disappear into a queue, and software should never fill the silence with a plausible guess.
What the partner should see on Friday
Imagine the pilot review at the end of the week. Most questions may have matched reviewed guidance and received a spoken Asante Twi response. One remains unresolved.
The useful record begins there.
The partner can see when the farmer asked the question, whether speech recognition captured it clearly, why AgriVoice withheld an automatic answer, and which extension officer received the escalation. The record also shows how long the case remained open and whether a safe response reached the farmer.
That visibility changes the conversation. Instead of hearing that “the system escalated,” the partner can examine what happened after escalation. Was the question assigned? Did the officer respond within the agreed working window? Did the farmer receive the response in a form they could understand? If the case remained open, who owns the next action?
This is the accountability Neuralis wants to test. The two-week pilot will measure whether at least 70 percent of questions are answered or correctly escalated, whether farmers understand the responses, whether they return in the second week, and whether the escalation process has a named owner. Any unsafe pesticide instruction reaching a farmer is a stop signal.
The safest answer may be a refusal
AgriVoice does not generate agronomy advice from scratch. It selects from reviewed content, speaks the approved response in Asante Twi, and sends missing or uncertain cases to a person.
That boundary matters most around chemicals. Three current content blocks remain withheld because dosage, re-entry intervals, and pre-harvest intervals still require clearance from a Ghanaian agronomist. Until that review is complete, refusal is the correct behavior.
The same rule applies when a question falls outside the reviewed material or when the speech transcript is too uncertain to support a safe selection. A fluent answer can still be wrong. Neuralis has already seen machine translation turn kokoo, cocoa, into “chicken.” That kind of confident substitution is why authoritative farming guidance needs reviewed language and a visible human fallback.
Our related piece on why human escalation makes AgriVoice safer examines that boundary in more detail. The half-filled spray tank AgriVoice must refuse to complete shows why withholding an answer can protect workers and crops.
What one cocoa-sector partner would own
The pilot needs one institution with a real relationship to cocoa farmers. That partner would recruit a cohort of 20 to 50 Asante-Twi-speaking farmers and name the extension officer responsible for escalations.
Before farmer exposure, a farming-aware translator must review the spoken Twi for 37 approved content blocks. A Ghanaian agronomist must resolve or continue withholding the three chemical blocks. At least 20 real farmer questions must be recorded and transcribed, with consent and deletion behavior tested. Staff must also rehearse the complete workflow without an unsafe answer and confirm that escalations reach the named officer.
During the pilot, the partner and Neuralis would review evidence rather than impressions. The scorecard covers successful answers, pesticide safety, comprehension, repeat use, response time, end-to-end performance, and cost per completed question. The result will support one of three decisions: continue, make one tightly scoped iteration, or stop.
Apollo 13 returned safely because uncertainty triggered disciplined coordination. For this pilot, Friday’s unresolved question is the test: a named officer has it, the elapsed time is visible, and the farmer’s safe response can be verified.
The next step is one cocoa-sector institution agreeing to own that chain with us for two weeks.
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