Plain Words LLC · Spokane, Washington
Software and data products for communities.
Plain Words LLC is a company in Spokane County, Washington. Its first product, Ask Spokane, is a free assistant that helps a person find local services by describing the situation in their own words and their own language. There is no account to create and no form to fill out.
The conversation works the same way in Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, Swahili, Dari, and Pashto, by text or by voice.
What Ask Spokane does
It answers a question about local help, and it keeps the answers current.
Most directories require the person to know the right category, and their listings go out of date. Ask Spokane was built to handle both problems.
Conversation instead of categories
A resident describes the situation in plain words, by text or voice, in ten languages, at any hour. The assistant answers briefly and shows a card for each organization with a phone number, address, hours, and directions. If the person describes a crisis, the assistant gives the crisis numbers word for word and the AI model is not involved in that reply.
Listings are checked every month
Phone numbers, addresses, and hours are re-checked every month, and state licensing lists are re-synced. Every card has a report button, and corrections usually go live within a day. Closed organizations are not deleted; they are marked closed with a reason and a date.
Reporting that keeps no personal data
Each request is reduced to a category, an urgency level, a zip code, and a language, and the text is discarded. Small counts are hidden. The result is a public view of what residents ask for and cannot find, and the system never stores a sentence anyone typed.
Ask Spokane
Our first deployment: a free, anonymous assistant for Spokane County, Washington. Food, housing, utilities, health care, behavioral health, legal aid, childcare, long-term care, and crisis lines, drawn from about 2,500 listings that are re-checked monthly.
It complements 211 and 988 rather than replacing them, and names 211 whenever a person is needed.
How the product is run
Four rules Ask Spokane follows.
- Free to the person asking.No accounts, no ads, no selling anything to people in need.
- Anonymous by design.No name, date of birth, or immigration status. A zip code is the only location known, and only if offered.
- Nothing proprietary underneath.Open-source frameworks and commodity cloud services, each replaceable without rewriting the application.
- Every decision written down.A published inclusion rule, a dated log of every rule change and data source, and closures recorded with reasons.
About
About the company.
Plain Words LLC is an independent company in Spokane County, Washington. It makes software and data products for communities: tools that help people find services, data that stays accurate, and reporting that shows where needs go unmet.
Vivek Patil, Ph.D., is Founder and Principal, and he does the work: the software, the data pipeline, the verification program, and the evaluation. He is Professor of Marketing and Director of Graduate Business Programs at Gonzaga University, where he has taught for more than twenty years; his research covers consumer behavior, data analytics, and measurement. He built Ask Spokane in 2026 as a personal project and formed Plain Words LLC to hold that work. The company is not affiliated with the university. More about him at patilv.com.
Contact
vivek@plainwords.io- Company
- Plain Words LLC
- Location
- Spokane County, Washington
- Principal
- Vivek Patil, Ph.D.
- Product
- askspokane.org