Stayboard

A Fire TV welcome screen for hotels. The TV becomes the receptionist, guests can ask questions the AI guide answers it. New question? It confirms with the owner and remembers it for the next guest.

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Inspiration

Every short-term-rental host answers the same few questions every week: the Wi-Fi password, checkout time, how the hot tub works, where to eat, whether there's a hair dryer and more. Same boring questions, repeated effort on every host's end. Every guest looks at the TV, and with a Vega OS app on a Fire TV it can be the house's front desk and answer the questions for you.

What it does

  • Ask the house: guests pick a suggested question or type one with the remote, or scan a QR code and ask from their phone. Amazon Nova 2 Lite answers only from what the host wrote (the guide, FAQs, rules, Wi-Fi, checkout, local picks). If that doesn't cover the question, the TV says so, gives the host's fallback line, and sends the question to the host's inbox.
  • The host replies once. The guest sees the reply on the TV or phone, and it is saved as a memory, so Nova answers it for every guest after and the current guest.
  • The rest of the screen: the TV turns on to a welcome screen with the guest's name, Wi-Fi with a scannable QR code, a checkout checklist, house rules, a house guide, local picks and contacts.
  • A host dashboard with a live preview of the TV, autosave and pairing by a six-letter code. The TV picks up changes within a minute.
  • A design studio: looping background video, photo or slideshow, background music, five layouts, three bundled typefaces, colours, a logo, and tiles the host can rename, drag into a new order, or hide. TV plays them through Vega's W3C media API.

How we built it

  • TV: React Native 0.83 for Vega (@amazon-devices/react-native-kepler), TVFocusGuideView for D-pad focus, @amazon-devices/react-native-w3cmedia <Video>/<Audio> for the backdrop and music, bundled OFL fonts, @amazon-devices/react-native-qrcode-svg, AsyncStorage for the device secret and the last config. Tested on the Vega Virtual Device.
  • Backend: Next.js 16 route handlers running on a through OpenNext, with uploads served with Range support and an immutable cache. No guest identity goes to the model. One layout engine in shared/design.ts is shared by the TV, the web preview and the guest page.
  • Dashboard and guest page: Next.js 16 App Router with Tailwind 4 and AlignUI components, deployed on the same Worker. The guest page is server-rendered at /g/<slug> and reached from a QR code on the TV.

Challenges we ran into

The friction log has all 18 entries. These cost the most time:

  • Vega lays out a 1080p TV at 960×540 logical points, and the getting-started docs don't say so. Our first build came up at double size.
  • A background <Audio> track took over the remote's Back button and closed the app until we set audioUsage to USAGE_GAME.
  • The virtual device has no screenshot or key-injection command, so we used the emulator console and inputd-cli to record them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built the whole project end to end.

What we learned

On a TV, every screen needs one obvious place for the D-pad to land, and TVFocusGuideView handled that without a navigation library. Letting the model say it doesn't know turned out to be the useful part of the AI: each answered: false marks a gap in the guide, and the host's reply fills it for the next guest.

What's next for Stayboard

Appstore submission, booking-calendar sync for guest names and dates, multi-language answers, a screensaver mode, and an email digest of unanswered questions.

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