Cortona OS

Inspiration

What it does

How we built itCortana OS – Your Intelligent Second Brain

📌 About the Project Cortana OS is a personal AI operating system built to help people manage digital overload. It acts like a persistent, real-time memory agent—ingesting your calendar, notes, screenshots, files, and reminders—and returns structured, queryable intelligence on demand. Think of it as your own context-aware, evolving assistant that grows with you. Powered by the Google Cloud Agent Dev Kit, this project makes AI memory tangible and usable.

💡 Inspiration This project was born out of necessity. As someone juggling dozens of workflows, I constantly felt overwhelmed by disorganized data across platforms—Google Drive, Apple Notes, iPhone screenshots, Gmail threads, and scattered to-dos. I didn’t want another productivity app. I needed a zero-friction AI brain—something that would structure my chaos, remember everything I forget, and make it easy to retrieve any detail just by asking. Cortana OS was the answer.

🔧 How I Built It Google Cloud Agent Dev Kit: Used as the foundation to deploy a persistent assistant with project memory, natural language interfaces, and integration points.

Vertex AI + Cloud Functions: Core backend logic for embedding files, parsing calendar events, classifying screenshots (OCR), and summarizing content.

Cloud Storage + Firestore: Central data lake for storing structured and unstructured data in a retrievable format.

Python Scripts: For scraping, OCR parsing, screenshot classification, Drive syncing, and hourly ingestion automation.

Google Calendar API & Apple Notes export (manual): Acted as data streams into the system.

🧠 What I Learned How to think about AI memory not just as storage—but as structured, evolving context.

How to integrate various GCP services into a unified pipeline using agentic architecture.

The importance of vertical UI design for neurodivergent users (like me) who avoid horizontal scrolling and clutter.

How small automation (like screenshot OCR) can lead to huge cognitive offload when it’s persistent and queryable.

⚠️ Challenges Faced Cross-platform friction: Apple Notes and iOS screenshots are not API-friendly, requiring creative workarounds and local scripting.

Memory persistence: Making sure the assistant retains memory across sessions without overloading cost or storage.

Context collapse: Keeping the assistant aware of who I am, what I’m working on, and what matters now—not just summarizing static files.

Minimal interaction design: I wanted the system to work without needing me to work on it—which required aggressive automation, smart defaults, and occasional reinforcement learning.

🌌 Final Thought Cortana OS isn’t just a project—it’s the blueprint for a future where AI becomes a memory partner. Built with Google Cloud, it shows how intelligent agents can serve not just companies, but individuals navigating complex lives.

Built With

• ai
• cloud
• google
• vertex