Operator

Inspiration

Last month one of us got a zero on a homework. He never saw it. It was hidden in Brightspace, the platform every Stony Brook class uses, between old posts and campus notices. We counted our feed this week: 94 items, 11 that mattered.

The theme was Steel and Steam. That made us think of the telegraph operator: someone who listens to every line all day and only comes to find you when a message really matters.

What it does

Operator is an AI agent that watches Brightspace for you and messages you on iMessage only when something matters.

• Filters, not forwards. Every 10 minutes it reads your Brightspace calendar and sorts each item: urgent, good to know, or ignore. In our feed, 83 of 94 were ignored. The dashboard shows why.
• Catches changes. If a professor moves a deadline, you get one line. Reminders at 24 h, 3 h and 1 h move with it.
• You can talk back. Text, voice note or a photo of your timetable. Gemini works out what you mean, marks things done, adds events, or answers questions. If it is not sure, it asks.
• It talks too. A short spoken briefing of your day, on your phone or on the dashboard with live subtitles. There is also a hands-free voice call mode.
• A simple dashboard. Home, week, deadlines, courses, a log of what the agent did. English or Chinese. Nothing to set up.

How we built it

• TypeScript on Node. The dashboard is one HTML file, no framework.
• Brightspace via its calendar feed, checked every 10 minutes and compared with the last check.
• Google Gemini for understanding text, photos and voice, for questions, and for writing the briefing.
• Photon for iMessage in both directions.
• ElevenLabs for voice, with word timestamps for the subtitles.
• Hosted on Vultr at myoperator.club, a GoDaddy Registry domain.

Challenges we ran into

• Gemini once made up a transcript for audio it could not decode and marked a homework done. We now convert all audio first and tell the model never to guess.
• iMessage would not play our voice notes until we changed the audio format.
• The server ran in UTC while all our times were New York time, which caused a fake "deadline moved" message. Fixed by pinning the timezone.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• The full loop works on real course data: Brightspace → filter → iMessage → reply from the phone → dashboard updates.
• 83 of 94 items correctly silenced, each with a reason.
• Voice in both directions, with live subtitles.
• Live on a real domain, open source, with tests.

What we learned

Filtering is the product. The value is in what the agent decides not to say, and in showing why.

What's next for Operator

Login with SBU email so anyone can connect their own feed, and reading instructor announcements from Brightspace emails.

Built With

• elevenlabs
• ffmpeg
• google-gemini
• imessage
• node.js
• photon
• typescript
• vultr