Aks: Understand Yourself

Your personal behavioral mirror. Analyze daily patterns, test new habits, and build a better you through actionable, data-driven self-insights.

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Inspiration

We noticed our lives were scattered across half a dozen apps like calendars for meetings, Todoist for tasks, Slack for work, and notes for random thoughts. None of these tools actually talk to each other to give a complete picture of the day. We wanted a single place where you could just dump your thoughts and figure out what actually drives your daily habits. That is why we built Aks. Aks means reflection, and we wanted this app to be exactly that. It is a personal mirror that helps you look at your routines and actually understand yourself better.

What it does

Aks acts as your daily sounding board. The core feature is Mirror, a chat interface where you can type or talk normally without feeling like you need to write the perfect prompt. Behind the scenes, it pulls in your real life by connecting securely to Google Calendar, Tasks, Gmail, GitHub, Slack, Notion, and Todoist. Because it already knows what meetings you had or what code you pushed, it actually understands your context. You do not have to spend time explaining your day to it.

How we built it

We built the mobile app using React Native and Expo to keep the UI smooth and native feeling, while Supabase handles our backend and authentication. Since this is the RevenueCat Shipaton, getting the subscription model right was a top priority. We integrated RevenueCat to manage the entire premium and free trial lifecycle so we did not have to rebuild that infrastructure from scratch.

For the voice feature, we hated that typical record, wait, and process delay. To fix that, we built a custom live speech recognition system that types out what you are saying in real time. A massive chunk of our time went into making all these different APIs and microservices play nicely together.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the live voice input to feel natural on Android was tough. We had to dig deep into native audio APIs to get the latency down so it actually feels like a fluid conversation. Also, keeping data synced between Supabase, a bunch of different OAuth providers, and RevenueCat was a headache. We ended up having to write custom telemetry just to track what was happening when a user went from the UI, through the backend, and back. It was a huge learning curve in building something production ready versus just a weekend hack.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are really proud that we managed to turn a massive, complicated idea into an app that actually feels simple to use. Getting real time voice, secure auth, multi platform API connections, and RevenueCat subscriptions working together perfectly was a huge win for us. But honestly, the best part is the user experience. You do not need a tutorial to use Aks. You just open it and talk. Hiding all that crazy backend complexity behind a clean chat interface is what we are most proud of.

What we learned

We learned that you have to hold back on features to make a good product. We wanted to add a million technical bells and whistles, but cutting them out to protect the core chat experience made the app so much better. We also learned that handling mobile infrastructure like managing permissions, native builds, and subscription states takes just as much engineering effort as building the actual AI features.

What is next

Right now, Aks is great for figuring out your day to day. Next, we are building out pattern recognition so it can spot long term habits you might not notice yourself. Soon, it will be able to point out recurring themes, what triggers your procrastination, or how you are allocating your time based on your connected data. The goal is for Aks to grow from a daily tracker into a lifelong tool for actually understanding yourself.

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