Secretary

Inspiration

Our friend group Discord Server kept proposing plans, but the plan stalled. Someone would say they wanted to play, get food, or study, and everyone agreed. Finding a time that actually worked was the part nobody wanted to do, so the idea died in the chat. Secretary is inspired by that. The person who suggests the plan should not have to collect everyone’s availability and negotiate a slot, and neither do the people in the group chat. They should be able to say what they want to do, and get back a time that fits for everyone.

What it does

Secretary is a personal scheduling assistant that lives in iMessage. You would text Secretary in a way you would text a friend, and turn that into a real calendar event. If you name a plan and a time, such as “I have a doctor appointment at 5,” Secretary books it. If your message only describes the plan, such as “I need to visit office hours before Thursday, Secretary can look at your calendar and the conversation, then send an iMessage poll with 3 open times spread across the time range. When the specific time you asked for overlaps with something already in your calendar, the poll will include an option to replace the event. Choosing from the option on the poll will prompt the Secretary to automatically add an event to the Google Calendar, and also send a link you can use to add it manually. Every scheduling request will prompt the Secretary to recheck the most recent Google Calendar, so deleted even no longer blocks the timeslot.

How we built it

We programmed the entire application with Cursor. We started with the Photon API, which allows our app to read and send text messages. We then connected that with Grok Inference API. Tiger Data to store chat context, and Google Calendar API.

Challenges we ran into

Our original idea was to have Secretary sit in a group chat, but this ended up not being feasible due to some of the limitations of the free Photon API tier that we had access to. However, Secretary worked so well in direct messages that we decided to pivot to a one-on-one personal assistant that lives in your iMessages, where you already plan things with friends and work on a daily basis.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Because this is our first hackathon, we are proud to have completed the whole project, but one thing in particular we're proud of is the Google Calendar integration. This required a lot of manual setup outside of the scope of our current AI agents, and it works very seamlessly. Secretary can read your schedule off of your Calendar, where you already have tons of data on when you're free and when you're busy. In the case that you're busy, it will also automatically suggest times that you're free based on your schedule. Finally, once you have a time that works, Secretary can schedule events on your behalf automatically, all from the convenience of a text message.

What we learned

This is our first hackathon and first experience with serious vibe coding, so we're extremely proud to have learned how to use Cursor and how to leverage free API’s (many of them generously donated) to create a product that can actually help people and integrate with people's lives in a seamless way.

What's next for Secretary

Group chat implementation, image input, integration into more messaging apps (Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp), and more!

Built With

• cursor
• google-calendar
• photon
• tigerdata