Wajo

Wajo is a San Francisco startup building Fo, a consumer AI operator that handles real-world errands like booking a haircut, chasing a plumber, renewing a passport, or ordering lunch for a team. Today's launch upgrades Fo's voice stack so it works both directions on the phone. Fo now has its own phone number that users can call to go hands free, and it also places outbound calls on their behalf, sitting through hold music and phone menus before reporting back with an answer . The demo also shows Fo taking instructions in Hindi and Hinglish and switching languages mid-conversation, extending the product beyond English-only voice assistants. This launch matters because most consumer agents still live inside a chat window. Wajo is pushing Fo toward the channels people actually use for logistics (phone calls, email, and group chats) and pairing that with the ability to transact, since Fo carries its own credit card to reserve, renew, and pay without users handing over card details . Making the agent reachable by direct dial, in a caller's native language, is a meaningful step toward using it from a car, a kitchen, or anywhere typing is inconvenient. Wajo is led by founder Shivani Poddar, who began her career at CMU researching natural language generation, built one of the first social conversation agents at the Alexa Prize, spearheaded multimodal AI at Meta, and spent the last few years launching frontier models at Google DeepMind and Google Labs. The product is currently in invite-only alpha, and this update is aimed at founders, operators, and busy households who want an agent that can pick up the phone as fluently as it drafts an email.