Plainletter AI Agent Helps Volunteers Decode Official Letters for Non-Native Readers

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A developer living in the Netherlands built Plainletter, an AI agent designed to assist library help-desk volunteers in explaining official government and institutional letters to residents who cannot read Dutch. The tool allows a volunteer to photograph or upload a letter, after which it identifies the sender, extracts key details like deadlines, amounts, and reference numbers, and provides a side-by-side explanation in both Dutch and the recipient's language. A built-in verifier cross-checks every extracted fact against the original letter text, refusing to pass any date, amount, or reference it cannot confirm, and sending the rejection back to the model to try again. During testing, the system correctly flagged a misread euro amount differing by just three cents and refused four facts from a deliberately obscured photograph. The project runs on Amazon Bedrock with Strands Agents SDK, costs roughly USD 0.107 per letter reading, and stores only consent-given, masked data for 30 days via AgentCore Memory in Frankfurt.

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