Inspiration
Agnes Brain was inspired by the daily overload students face: classes, deadlines, emails, notes, PDFs, reminders, and last-minute schedule changes all live in separate places. We wanted to build a student secretary that does more than answer questions. The goal was an assistant that can actually manage a student’s workflow, remember study material, and turn scattered information into something useful.
What it does
Agnes Brain is an AI-powered student secretary with a web app and Telegram bot.
It can manage calendar events, check for schedule conflicts, send reminders, summarize Gmail messages, store study notes, process uploaded PDFs and images, and organize learning materials into a visual Brain graph. Students can view their knowledge in 2D or 3D, grouped by subject and topic.
It also turns saved study material into revision tools, such as summaries and quizzes.
How we built it
We built the backend with Python and FastAPI. The assistant logic is handled by custom agents for scheduling, email, study notes, reminders, and Brain storage.
The calendar system syncs local app events with Google Calendar. The Gmail integration uses Google OAuth to read recent emails. The Brain system stores uploaded PDFs, images, and text locally, extracts useful content, summarizes it with AI, and saves it as structured study knowledge.
The frontend is built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The main app includes tabs for home, calendar, Brain, and account features. The Brain view supports both 2D and 3D graph exploration. We also added a Telegram bot with clickable buttons so students can quickly add calendar events, remove events, upload study material, list Brain items, and generate quizzes.
Challenges we ran into
One major challenge was syncing multiple interfaces. A student might add an event through Telegram, remove it from the web app, or view it through Google Calendar, so the local app and Google Calendar needed to stay consistent.
Another challenge was handling schedule conflicts. Instead of silently overwriting events, the assistant needs to detect occupied time slots and ask the user whether to keep, shift, or remove conflicting events.
We also ran into integration issues with Gmail OAuth scopes, Telegram HTML formatting, browser caching, local file storage, and keeping the Brain graph updated after items were added or removed.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that Agnes Brain is not just a chatbot. It can perform real actions across calendar, email, Telegram, study storage, and the web interface.
We are especially proud of the Brain feature because it turns ordinary study materials into an organized visual knowledge graph. Instead of uploading a PDF and forgetting about it, students can connect it to a subject, view it as a node, and later generate revision content from it.
We are also proud of making the assistant accessible from both a web app and Telegram, because students can interact with it wherever they already are.
What we learned
We learned how important it is to design AI systems around real workflows, not just conversations. The hardest part was not getting the AI to respond, but making sure its actions were reliable, reversible, and understandable.
We also learned a lot about OAuth, Google APIs, Telegram bots, local storage, file processing, and building a backend that multiple frontends can share.
Most importantly, we learned that a useful student AI assistant needs memory, structure, and confirmation. For example, deleting a calendar event or Brain item should not be guessed blindly. The assistant needs to ask, confirm, and then act.
What's next for Agnes Brain
Next, we want to improve the Brain into a stronger study companion. This includes better automatic topic connections, smarter quiz generation, flashcards, spaced repetition, and deeper Obsidian integration.
We also want to improve mobile support, add richer notifications, and make the calendar conflict system more intelligent so Agnes Brain can suggest better alternatives automatically.
In the future, Agnes Brain could become a full academic operating system for students: one place to manage time, knowledge, revision, and daily responsibilities.
Built With
- agnes
- googlecloudapi
- javascript
- json
- obsidian
- python
