Building LARS: A Voice-First AI Agent for Food Safety Labs

Disclaimer: I created this piece of content for the purposes of entering the Gemini Live Agent Challenge hackathon. The daily workflow in a food safety laboratory involves analyzing thousands of pesticide residue samples, often buried in complex Excel sheets or PDF reports. Finding specific analytical data usually takes time away from actual scientific work. I wanted to change that. The Solution: LARS (Laboratory Analytics & Risk System) LARS is a voice-first, multimodal AI agent designed to bridge the gap between analytical chemists and their complex datasets. Instead of writing queries, lab staff can simply use their voice or phone camera to ask about compliance limits or sample results, and get an instant, deterministic answer. How It Was Built with Google AI & Google Cloud: To ensure zero AI hallucinations—a critical requirement in public health and scientific environments—I designed a secure, two-tier architecture: The Brain (Google Gemini 2.0 Flash Live API): I utilized the newes