Tagline
Bring the society gate into the resident's conversation—with clear permission, time-limited access, and a record the guard can trust.
Inspiration
Our starting question was simple: why should someone cooking, caring for a child, or stepping away from their phone need to interrupt everything to handle a gate call? A visitor request should reach the household's assistant, but an assistant must never confuse familiarity with permission.
What it does
Society Gate is a resident-controlled visitor companion. A guard registers an arrival. The resident reviews the exact visitor through an Alexa+ experience simulated in a web client. A two-step choice prepares a decision, asks for confirmation, and only then updates the guard's desk. The guard records entry and exit. Every decision has an actor-stamped receipt.
Residents can also create short-lived rules for regular visitors. Automatic approval requires a matching vendor-verified identity, not a visitor's name. A rule for one flat never grants access to another. Revoking a rule withdraws its unused approvals.
How we built it
A Python service enforces the visitor lifecycle using SQLite transactions. The official Python MCP SDK exposes five resident-scoped tools over Streamable HTTP. Our browser client actually initializes protocol 2025-11-25, discovers tools, and invokes them. Its protocol panel makes the calls visible.
Confirmation records survive service reconstruction. Retries return the same receipt, concurrent decisions cannot overwrite each other, and timeouts never grant entry. Agent instructions treat visitor-supplied text as data. Authorization is enforced by the service rather than by a model's interpretation of a flat number.
What makes it useful
The useful unit is the entire arrival-to-decision-to-entry workflow. A resident can ask for the decision's history after the guard records movement. Regular visitors and unfamiliar visitors follow different, explicit authority paths. The same service supports a human-operated fallback when conversational access is unavailable.
The intended audience is residential communities with a staffed gate and households that benefit from conversational access. We have not measured user adoption or time savings and are not claiming a deployed customer pilot.
What is real and what is simulated
The MCP transport, tools, database, resident decisions, guard desk, and rules are working local software. The Alexa+ front end is explicitly simulated; there is no live Alexa+ device connection. The existing society vendor app is not connected because vendor API access is unavailable. A mock adapter exercises the intended event contract. A separate classic Alexa custom-skill adapter is included but has not been deployed or tested on an Echo.
What changed during development
Society Gate was developed during October 20–23, 2026. The application includes household authorization, a visitor state machine, persistent approvals, guard/resident interfaces, regular-visitor rules, Alexa conversation handling, a Streamable HTTP MCP server/client, and 29 application tests.
Next steps
Validate with guards and residents; obtain supported vendor API access; add resident enrollment and OAuth; establish a shared-device confirmation policy; then connect a deployed service through an approved Alexa+ onboarding route.
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