HomeRelay — Your AI Household Coordinator

The Problem

Running a household involves dozens of small decisions: What should we cook tonight? Do we have all the ingredients? What needs to be purchased? Who will pick it up? Did anyone remember to set a reminder?

These tasks are simple individually, but coordinating them across a household creates unnecessary mental load, repeated work, and forgotten responsibilities.

Our Solution

HomeRelay turns scattered household tasks into one coordinated workflow.

Instead of treating pantry checks, meal planning, shopping lists, errands, and reminders as separate activities, HomeRelay connects them into a single household coordination experience.

With HomeRelay, users can:

• Check the pantry: Identify which ingredients are available and which are missing.
• Plan dinner: Build meal plans around available ingredients.
• Generate shopping lists: Turn missing ingredients into a list with estimated costs and budget awareness.
• Assign errands: Organize shopping responsibilities among household members.
• Create reminders: Keep important household tasks from being forgotten.
• Review before acting: Preview proposed actions and confirm them before making changes.
• Track activity: Inspect an action log to understand what the system did.

How It Works

HomeRelay follows a simple workflow:

1. Understand: Gather the household's available ingredients, preferences, budget, and members.
2. Plan: Identify a suitable meal, detect missing ingredients, and prepare the shopping list.
3. Coordinate: Propose assignments and reminders based on the plan.
4. Confirm: Let the user review proposed changes before execution.
5. Track: Record completed actions so the workflow remains understandable.

The key idea is that household assistance should be more than a chatbot response. It should connect planning with controlled, traceable actions.

What Makes HomeRelay Different?

Many household apps focus on a single task, such as grocery lists, recipes, or reminders. HomeRelay is designed around the connections between those tasks.

A dinner decision can lead to an ingredient check, which can generate a shopping list, which can become an assigned errand, followed by a reminder. This connected workflow is the core of the project.

HomeRelay also emphasizes user control and transparency. Actions that change household state should be reviewed before confirmation, and an activity log helps users understand what happened. Idempotency safeguards are intended to prevent accidental duplicate execution.

Technology

The project uses a React and TypeScript frontend built with Vite, supported by a Node.js and Express backend. Household data and action records use local JSON-based persistence for the demo.

The architecture separates the user interface from backend business logic and REST API operations. The project is also being prepared for Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools so household capabilities can be exposed through a standardized tool interface.

The current demo uses simulated household data. External services, real smart-home devices, and Alexa+ integration should not be considered available unless separately implemented and verified.

Challenges and What We Learned

One challenge was designing a workflow that connects several household operations without making the experience complicated. Each action needs clear inputs, understandable results, and appropriate validation.

Another important challenge was balancing automation with user control. Automatically planning a task is useful, but executing a state-changing action without review can lead to unwanted results. This led to a preview-and-confirm approach, alongside action logging and duplicate-execution safeguards.

Building the project also highlighted the importance of keeping the frontend, backend, data persistence, and tool interfaces consistent. A feature is not complete simply because it looks correct in the interface; its backend behavior must also be validated.

What's Next?

The next steps are to complete and test the MCP server, strengthen automated testing, and investigate the integration requirements for the Alexa+ track. Further development can explore richer household preferences, more capable planning, and integrations with supported external services.

Our Vision

A well-run household should require less coordination overhead, not more apps to manage.

HomeRelay aims to make everyday household responsibilities easier to plan, share, and complete—with the user remaining in control.

Built With

• api
• context
• express.js
• json
• model
• node.js
• protocol
• react
• rest
• typescript
• vite