Tapio is a guide network that helps people navigate Finnish immigration — residence permits, employment, benefits, and housing — through one coordinated conversation grounded in official sources.
Moving to a new country means learning an unfamiliar bureaucracy in a language you may not read fluently, from a dozen different authorities that don't talk to each other. Tapio is a first stop: it answers in plain language, tells you exactly which official page an answer came from, and hands you off to a specialist guide when your question crosses into their territory — all without asking who you are.
🔗 Live roster and product overview: finntegrate.org/tapio
Note
Project status: Tapio is in active development. The coordinator plus four specialists (Ilmarinen, Sampo, Rauni, Otso) are live today; seven more guides on the public roster are planned but not yet built (see the guide network below). Conversation history, accounts, and proactive guidance are also still on the roadmap — see the PRD for what's shipped versus planned.
Finnish immigration information is scattered across Migri, Kela, TE-palvelut, municipal services, and more — written in dense administrative language, often only in Finnish and Swedish. People navigating this system are frequently non-native speakers under time pressure who don't yet know which authority to ask, or what to even call the thing they need.
A generic chatbot doesn't fix this: it hides who's answering, why an answer applies to your situation, and whether it's trustworthy enough to act on. Tapio is built around the opposite bet — that trust in an AI system navigating something this consequential comes from visible expertise, cited sources, and a stated boundary of what it won't do, not from a single black-box assistant that sounds confident about everything.
- A named guide network, not one assistant. Tapio (the coordinator) and specialists like Ilmarinen, Sampo, Rauni, and Otso — each named for a figure from Finnish cultural heritage — handle distinct domains. Every answer is attributed to the guide that gave it, with a plain-language reason for why that guide was chosen.
- Every answer is sourced, or says it isn't. Guide answers cite the official page they're drawn from; if no reliable source is found, Tapio says so rather than guessing. Crisis and legal-sensitive questions are redirected to vetted official resources instead of an ordinary answer — see the guardrails spec for exactly how that detection works.
- Proactive, not just reactive. Newcomers often don't know what to ask next. Guides surface likely-relevant next steps tied to your situation, grounded in the same official sources as any direct answer.
- One conversation, not a maze of tabs. A permit question that turns into a benefits question stays in the same thread — no repeating your situation to a different tool.
- Privacy by design, not by policy. Tapio doesn't ask for or retain a case number, application status, or family details. Many people who rely on it — asylum seekers, undocumented people, people fleeing abuse — face real physical risk from a data exposure, so the product is built to have as little as possible to expose.
- Knows its own boundary. Tapio is explicit that it isn't a caseworker, legal representative, or official authority, and hands off to human or official support when a question needs one.
| Guide | Role | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Tapio | Coordinator — routing, handoffs, cross-guide summaries | Live |
| Ilmarinen | Residence permits, visas, applications | Live |
| Sampo | Job seeking, career pathways, workplace culture | Live |
| Rauni | Kela, social security, benefits, family support | Live |
| Otso | Housing, tenant rights, settlement | Live |
| Pellervo | Entrepreneurship, business establishment | Planned |
| Agricola | Language learning, education, qualification recognition | Planned |
| Louhi | Finnish customs and etiquette | Planned |
| Mielikki | Healthcare navigation | Planned |
| Lempi | Mental health, community connections | Planned |
| Ahti | Transportation, utilities, banking | Planned |
| Kokko | Regional and municipal services | Planned |
Each name comes from Finnish cultural heritage, paired with a specific area of expertise. Full scope per guide is in PRD §6; the canonical public roster is finntegrate.org/tapio.
- Students navigating study-related residence permits and enrollment
- Workers exploring employment-based permits, job seeking, and workplace rights
- Families pursuing reunification, or supporting a family member's application
- Refugees and asylum seekers needing guidance on process and available support
- Partner organizations — NGOs, employers, and municipalities — that refer clients to Tapio and want visibility into how it supports their own advising work
crawler ── Markdown + source_url ──> content/ ── embeddings ──> vectorstore/ ──> backend ──> app
A crawler collects official source pages, an ingestion pipeline chunks and embeds them into a vector store, and a FastAPI backend runs the multi-agent retrieval and routing logic (LangGraph) behind a chat API. A SvelteKit web app is the reference client. See Documentation below for the full architecture and product spec.
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| Product requirements (PRD) | Product goals, the guide network, success metrics, open questions |
| Architecture decision records | Why the system is built the way it is |
| Specs | Detailed designs for specific subsystems (guardrails, multi-agent chat, the ontological harness, and more) |
| CONTRIBUTING.md | Development environment setup, running the pipeline locally, code style, and how to submit changes |
| WORKFLOW.md | How work is planned and triaged on the project board |
git clone https://github.com/Finntegrate/tapio.git
cd tapioSetup, dependencies, running the pipeline, LLM provider configuration, and troubleshooting are all in CONTRIBUTING.md — kept there rather than duplicated here so operational detail stays in one place as it changes.
Contributions of any kind are welcome — code, documentation, translations, or source research. See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, code style, and the pull request process.
Licensed under the European Union Public License version 1.2. See LICENSE for details.
Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):
 Brylie Christopher Oxley 🚇 |
 AkiKurvinen 🔣 💻 |
 ResendeTech 💻 |
This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!