Relay

Inspiration

Students and everyday users often need more than an answer from an AI assistant. They need help turning a request into an organized plan, tracking tasks, and updating their work without starting over.

This inspired Relay, a local AI-powered conversational workflow assistant built as a simulated Alexa+ experience.

What it does

Relay turns natural-language requests into structured workflows. For example, a student preparing for an exam can ask for a study plan, revision tasks, and a checklist. Relay presents proposed actions for review before the user approves their execution.

Relay also supports contextual follow-ups, allowing users to propose updates to an existing plan and ask what remains to be completed based on their saved workspace.

How we built it

Relay is built with React, JavaScript, CSS, and Vite. It uses Ollama with the Qwen 2.5 1.5B model for local AI inference. Browser localStorage preserves workspace data, while a Vite development proxy connects the frontend to the local Ollama service.

The application combines conversational interaction, structured workflow previews, explicit approval controls, task tracking, study plans, checklists, and activity history.

Challenges we faced

A key challenge was making a small local language model useful for multi-step interactions. Contextual follow-ups, duplicate prevention, reliable progress reporting, and clear separation between proposed and approved actions required careful handling.

We also focused on keeping the interface understandable and avoiding unnecessary complexity.

What we learned

Building Relay helped us explore local AI integration, conversational context, workflow coordination, user-controlled execution, and practical frontend development. We learned that an assistant should not only generate suggestions but also make proposed actions and their results clear to the user.

What's next

Future improvements could include stronger workflow validation, more robust local model handling, expanded educational workflows, and accessibility improvements.

Relay is a simulated Alexa+ experience for the Amazon Developer Hackathon. It does not claim actual Alexa+ device integration or Amazon account access.

Built With

• css
• javascript
• localstorage
• ollama
• qwen-2.5
• react
• vite