Inspiration

In India, millions of parents in their 60s and 70s live alone in their home towns while their children work in other cities. They take three to six tablets a day, can't read the small print on the strips, and their children call every day to ask the same thing: did you take your tablet?

Alexa+ arrived in Indian homes this year, in Hindi, English and Hinglish. Voice is the one interface that works for this parent: ageing eyes, stiff fingers, and a moment ("le li", I took it) that happens in the kitchen, nowhere near a screen.

What it does

Amma's Hour is an Alexa+ add-on, built as a self-hosted MCP server.

Doses: "Raat ki dawai kaunsi hai?" Alexa reads each tablet by name, colour and how to take it, with a pill card on Echo Show. "Le li" logs the doses.
Double-dose guard: a second dose of the same tablet in the same part of the day is refused before it happens.
Daily check-in: it listens for warning signs (chest pain, a fall, dizziness, breathlessness, fainting) in English, Hinglish or Hindi and alerts the family at once, without ever diagnosing.
Refills: when a medicine is about to run out, it reads the full price and only orders after a clear yes, then sends the receipt to the family.
Family view: the son in Bengaluru asks "How is Amma doing this week?" and hears her adherence, the medicines she misses most and any warning signs, with a chart on screen.

How we built it

A TypeScript MCP server on the official SDK, implementing MCP 2025-11-25 over Streamable HTTP with sessions.
Eight tools that speak in short, voice-ready sentences and return structured content. Two of them link MCP Apps cards (ui:// resources) that render on Echo Show.
The care rules (India-time slots, brand / generic / colour / Hindi name matching, duplicate guard, red flags, refills, weekly view) are pure functions with persistent state.
The Alexa+ Web Simulator and Local Inspector are partner-only, so we built an Echo Show simulator that is a real MCP client and a real MCP Apps host, with Hindi and English voice. Every action you see is a genuine tools/call, shown live in an "Under the hood" panel.
An Agent Skill (SKILL.md) packages the care routine for any agent.
25 tests talk to the server through an MCP client and are named after Amazon's published Alexa+ functional requirements (tool validation, no JSON or ids in speech, duplicates, explicit yes after the full price, at most five options, 401 on an invalid token, and more).

Challenges we ran into

Building blind: no participant can connect a self-hosted MCP server to Alexa+ or run the official inspector, so Amazon's functional requirements became our test oracle and the simulator our client.
Hindi medicine names: parents say "BP ki dawai" or "gulabi goli", not "Telmisartan 40 mg", so every medicine carries aliases and a description of how it looks.
Safety: the add-on is about adherence and family connection, never medical advice.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A complete daily loop (doses, check-in, refill, family summary) that works end to end by voice in Hindi and English; a double-dose guard; MCP Apps cards that match what is spoken; 25 passing tests mapped to Amazon's requirements; and an open simulator other builders can use.

What we learned

Writing for the ear is different: short sentences, colours instead of drug names, one question at a time, never more than five options. And a spec you can't run against is still a spec: turning Amazon's requirement list into tests caught real bugs (a tablet described as "white oval" didn't match; "le li" after the morning list logged into the wrong slot).

What's next

A real pharmacy partner and WhatsApp for family alerts; prescription photo to schedule; a shared view for caregivers; more Indian languages (Kannada, Tamil, Bengali) as Alexa+ adds them; and a pilot with real families, with consent.