followthru

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Inspiration

People always make promises they don't keep. "I'll do the dishes tonights.", "I'll send my part of the lab report by 9pm.", "I'll call you later.", and then they forget. Current reminder tools need external setup but followthru tracks when the commitment is made from the source through conversations. followthru was made to address this gap with the premise that your messages themselves could hold you accountable.

What it does

followthru is an AI-powered iMessage assistant that automatically detects commitments in conversations and holds users accountable to them. From when you send the "I'll send you the notes tonight" text it will detect the commitment, extract the deadline you promised, checks in automatically, and prompts the user to respond and take action.

How we built it

followthru was built with JavaScript (Node.js) The messaging layer used Photon’s Spectrum SDK (TypeScript/JavaScript) to connect to and interact with iMessage conversations. We implemented an AI layer with the Gemini model 2.5 Flash Lite and had the model

detect if a message was a commitment
extract deadlines from natural language

Challenges we ran into

Our first iteration of followthru did not implement AI. However we ran into an issue where if a user typed an input such as "I promise I am not lying", it considered this as a commitment due to our hard coded trigger phrases like "I promise". Once we integrated AI, we were able to better understand context and intent of the messages, which reduced false positives and helped us to filter out irrelevant messages.

Another challenge was getting started with Photon, but after attending the Photon workshop and getting help form the Photon team we were able to integrate this novel technology in a way that we're proud of!