Kindred

Inspiration

Ama is a nurse on nights. Jean works from the kitchen table. Maya and Eli are on school time. They share a living room, but not a clock. Group chats do not hold a doorbell. Calendars do not tell a twelve-year-old to keep the hallway quiet.

Kindred is an Alexa+ experience for that household: one Show, one now.

What it does

• Quiet hours hold the doorbell and send nudges to phones, not the speaker
• School pickup, dinner, and chores live on the same surface
• A wake briefing for the person who just got home: what still needs a decision, and whether they still overlap with the kids

How we built it

Kindred is a self-hosted MCP server on Streamable HTTP, spec 2025-11-25, plus an Alexa+ Show simulator that is a real MCP client. It sends initialize, tools/list, and tools/call. There is also an Agent Skill at skills/kindred-household/SKILL.md.

Run: npm install then npm run dev. Open http://localhost:3000/device

Challenges

Outside developers cannot attach a self-hosted MCP server to a real Alexa+ device. Amazon’s FAQ says the official path is a web app that speaks Streamable HTTP. We built that, and kept the protocol inspector on screen so judges can see the session.

What we learned

The MCP spec is enough to ship a brand-like Alexa+ experience without a partner console. The missing piece is a hosted Alexa+ emulator that is itself an MCP client.

Built With

• alexa+
• mcp
• next.js
• node.js
• typescript