HomeRelay

Inspiration

Inspiration In shared homes, a task often goes missing in a quiet way. The person responsible gets stuck at college or work, everyone assumes someone else will handle it, and nobody explicitly takes over. Reminders tell you a task exists, but they don't help once the plan has failed. HomeRelay is built for that moment.

What it does

HomeRelay is a conversational assistant, presented as my own simulated Alexa+ experience, that makes sure a shared household task actually gets done.

Create a task: "Remind me to collect the parcel from reception before 7 PM." Handle change:"I'm stuck at college and can't collect it." The assistant checks the availability entered for household members and suggests a replacement, with the reason. Explicit acceptance: the suggested person must Accept or Decline. Nothing is reassigned until they agree. Verify completion: the new owner marks the task collected, and the assistant confirms who did it and when. -Be honest about failure: if everyone declines, it says "No replacement has accepted; the task remains unresolved."

The core idea is the difference between requested, accepted and completed.

How I built it

Backend: Python + FastAPI, with SQLite storing tasks, members and a full status history. Tools: an MCP server (Streamable HTTP) exposing create_task, get_household_availability, propose_handoff, respond_to_handoff, complete_task and get_task_history. AI: [name the model you used] interprets natural-language requests and explains suggestions. Deadlines, permissions and status changes are enforced by normal application logic, not by the model. Frontend: HTML/CSS/JavaScript with three screens: Today (pending, awaiting acceptance, completed), Assistant (chat beside a visible tool-activity panel) and Task details (owner, deadline, accept/decline/complete controls, history).

• A labelled member switcher lets one person demonstrate both sides of a handoff. Household members and availability are demo data.

Challenges

• Keeping the AI from "assuming" a handoff happened. The assistant can only propose; the status changes only after the other person responds.
• Designing the failure cases (declined, nobody available) so the app reports them clearly.
• [Add a real challenge you hit today.]

Testing

I tested these cases: successful handoff, declined handoff, nobody available, expired deadline and duplicate completion request. Results: [write the actual outcome of each].

What I learned

[1-2 honest sentences, e.g. what you learned about separating AI interpretation from application rules.]

What's next

Real notifications to household members, voice input, recurring tasks, and testing with real households.

Notes

This is a simulation and is not connected to real Alexa devices. [If reusing earlier code, state what you built during the hackathon.]

Built With

• ai
• alexa+
• css
• fastapi
• html
• javascript
• python
• sqlite