Inspiration
A broken heater should not turn into an evening of tabs, phone calls, price comparisons, and second-guessing. I wanted the ease of asking Alexa for help, with the control to know exactly what happens before anything is booked.
What it does
Employee+ is a virtual home-care concierge. Ask what needs attention this week; see repair options, prices, and available times side by side; then choose a provider. Employee+ prepares the appointment, reads back the provider, price, date, and policy, and books only after an explicit yes. If you move the visit, it changes the date without quietly changing your provider or price. A responsive Home Care Board makes each step visible, and you can check status or retrieve a clearly simulated service document later.
How I built it
I built Employee+ from scratch as a TypeScript monorepo. Its self-hosted MCP server uses Streamable HTTP and MCP 2025-11-25 to expose validated tools, resources, and a self-contained React MCP App. Deterministic domain rules—not an LLM—control quotes, booking drafts, version checks, confirmation, and idempotency. AWS CDK defines the HTTPS ECS deployment, Cognito, DynamoDB, SQS/Lambda, S3, KMS, and observability. An explicitly labeled Alexa+ simulation exercises the MCP tools. The submitted 1:16 walkthrough has English on-screen text and no audio; it shows the simulation, not footage from an Alexa device or Alexa+ Preview.
Challenges I ran into
My AWS account has not yet been enabled for the private Alexa+ MCP Preview. That prevents me from using the official CLI, Local Inspector, and device-side certification. Instead of implying those tests passed, I tested my self-hosted MCP service and recorded the experience as a simulation. Making the Home Care Board a self-contained MCP resource and preserving unchanged booking details across a reschedule required especially careful lifecycle and contract tests.
Accomplishments I am proud of
Employee+ makes the handoff from suggestion to action unambiguous: prepare is read-only, confirmation is explicit, and repeated requests cannot create duplicate bookings. The interface works in light and dark modes, the MCP service is live over HTTPS, and my 1:16 silent demo uses English on-screen text to tell the story in under three minutes.
What I learned
Trust is a product feature. An agent can make household decisions easier only if prices stay deterministic, the user sees the exact commitment, and voice and screen tell the same story.
What is next
I plan to validate Employee+ in the official Alexa+ Preview when Amazon enables access; this submission does not claim Preview certification. All households, providers, prices, bookings, and documents shown here are synthetic. There are no real payments or service fulfillments.
Source, setup, tests, and evidence: https://github.com/Akunimal/employee-plus Public MCP endpoint: https://em-6b89df16691a48baa3d609a935379774.ecs.us-east-2.on.aws/mcp
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