Mental wellbeing for a billion lives — how our experiences helped us build an empathetic companion

The talk

India has a hidden mental health pandemic the size of its population and most solutions are built for English speaking metros. But Bharat doesn’t grieve in English. It doesn’t confess in English. It doesn’t ask for help in English. AskOwly is a voice-first wellbeing companion that lets people express themselves freely in a language they are comfortable in. Hindi, Marathi, Hinglish, and the mixed coding in between ; without judgement or fear.

This talk is about what we’ve learned from real users: what they actually say when the interface finally speaks their language, what surprised us, and what it takes to build a companion people trust with the things they don’t say out loud anywhere else.

Why this matters for a MultiLingo audience

Language in mental health isn’t a translation layer. It’s the product.

English is the language most Indian mental health products are built in. It is not the language most of India feels in. The word for “anxiety” doesn’t cleanly exist in Marathi. “Depression” gets rendered as “tension” or “weakness of mind” in most Hindi contexts. A user who would never type “I feel hopeless” into a chatbot will say “मन नहीं लग रहा” out loud ; and mean something meaningful and actionable. When the product lets them speak the way they think, everything changes: what they share, how long they stay, whether they come back.

We’ll walk through:

• Why English is not the language Bharat expresses itself in and what that means for anyone building products meant to reach beyond the metros
• What users actually say when the language barrier disappears the topics, the openness, the length of conversations, the moments people surprise themselves
• Voice as the unlock, not text why the intimacy of speaking changes what people are willing to share, especially in vernacular
• Mixed-coding is the default real examples of how our users move between Hindi, Marathi, English, and Hinglish inside a single sentence, and why designing for that mattered more than we expected
• Cultural idioms of distress how people in India actually describe suffering, and why standardized clinical language misses most of it
• What the user feedback taught us the feedback that reshaped our roadmap, the assumptions we got wrong, and the moments that told us we were on the right track

What you’ll walk away with

An honest, ground-level view of what it takes to build an empathetic companion for the majority of India : from the user’s voice, not the founder’s deck.

Who I am

I’m Rishu Mehrotra, co-founder of Avalon Tech Labs. AskOwly is our mental wellbeing venture. Prior Experience : BCG, Visa, LinkedIn, InMobi, Amazon, Wayfair. I lead technology; my co-founder Praveen Chaudhari leads product; institutional partnerships and outreach.

We’re live in an early pilot, working with certified bodies on clinical evaluation, and in active conversations with several large Indian institutions on wider deployment.