Pothole Reporter: A Viral App That Drafts Road Complaints

Bengaluru engineer Gaurav Sen’s Pothole Reporter turns a dashcam drive into a ready-to-send road complaint in about four seconds, but no official record matches a road segment closely enough for it to name a contractor.
artificial-intelligence
data-science
Author

Kabui, Charles

Published

2026-09-14

Keywords

pothole-detection, civic-tech, computer-vision, open-data, android-app

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Bengaluru engineer Gaurav Sen’s viral demo looked like instant accountability: a dashcam, GPS, and accelerometer feed potholes to OpenAI’s vision models, which match each defect to a government road contract and produce a complaint naming the contractor and the responsible officer in about four seconds. What shipped is narrower and more careful. Pothole Reporter is an open-source Android app, MIT licensed, that Sen built with Deepanshu Pathak. It runs in the background while Maps or a call is open, samples roughly one frame in five, and flags garbage and open manholes as well.

Naming a contractor was not possible. The app scans 3,787 national highway tender rows plus state procurement feeds, but it prints a contractor’s name only when official evidence confirms the exact road segment, work scope, award, road owner, and warranty. No record lines up on all five points, so complaints name no contractor. It also never submits anything on its own: it drafts an email, a short WhatsApp message, or copyable portal fields carrying the photo, coordinates, and tender reference, then hands the user to the official service.

Routing a complaint to the right office is automatable. Deciding who is to blame is not, and the app treats that difference as a hard boundary rather than a marketing line. Coverage now spans all 28 states and 8 union territories, 680 mapped national highway references, and four languages, paid for by each user’s own OpenAI API key.

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Citation

BibTeX citation:
@misc{kabui2026,
  author = {{Kabui, Charles}},
  title = {Pothole {Reporter:} {A} {Viral} {App} {That} {Drafts} {Road}
    {Complaints}},
  date = {2026-09-14},
  url = {https://toknow.ai/posts/pothole-reporter-dashcam-ai-complaint-app/},
  langid = {en-GB}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Kabui, Charles. 2026. “Pothole Reporter: A Viral App That Drafts Road Complaints.” https://toknow.ai/posts/pothole-reporter-dashcam-ai-complaint-app/.