Karuna - Your Productivity Companion

Embark on a productivity journey with your AI pet companion. Talk through what's blocking you, celebrate wins, and never feel alone in the grind. Expand your pet's dynamic world with your progress.

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Karuna

Inspiration

Most productivity apps are simply digital checklists with zero accountability. Tasks pile up and fight for your attention, leaving you overwhelmed. We believe that procrastination isn't laziness - it is an emotion-regulation problem.

We built a companion that tags along you as you tackle tasks, and ensures you never feel alone when overwhelmed. It is designed to listen and talk you through roadblocks while making sure you continuously achieve your goals! And, you get a peek into the companion’s world and unlock new features as you succeed, which really reinforces that you are on this journey together!

We named the app Karuna. In Sanskrit, it means compassion. It's also a wordplay combining "Care" and the Hindi word "Karna" (to do). Our philosophy is simple: getting things done is easier when you have a companion who cares.

What it does

Karuna is an emotionally intelligent AI companion that acts as your empathetic coach.

  • Dynamic Support: If you're overwhelmed, it uses guided techniques to get you unstuck. If you're venting, it will listen and comfort you. If you crush a task, it hypes you up! At the same time, the conversation is guided deterministically to never deviate you from your tasks.
  • Narrative Rewards: Your success isn't just points on a screen. Completing tasks generates new features (location, friend, activities) for your companion. So you get to discover a rich story of your pet exploring new hobbies and adventures through a ‘day in companion’s life’ log.

Key Dialogue Scenarios

  • Stuck Diagnostic: Instead of generic advice, the engine asks targeted questions to find the root cause of paralysis (e.g., low energy vs. avoidance).
  • Empathetic Venting: It acts like a real friend, avoiding "toxic positivity" (like "you've got this!") to validate negative emotions and offer gentle coping strategies.
  • Actionable Unblocking: When the user is overwhelmed, it cuts through decision fatigue by offering exactly one immediate next step and a guilt-free "escape" option.
  • Data-Driven Reflection: At the end of the day, it analyzes the user's task completion and time-estimation stats to provide a single, actionable insight for better planning tomorrow.

How we built it

The key that powers the dialogue is a robust Deterministic Dialogue Engine in Swift.

  • Dynamic Personas: You can choose the AI's tone (warm/strict) based on which approach motivates you.
  • Intent Engine: A custom intent classifier that recognizes user intent (Venting vs. Stuck vs. Celebratory) to guarantee contextually appropriate responses.
  • Reward Generation: Logic that dynamically turns task completions into engaging new features (location, friend, activities) that enrich text-logs of your pet's life.
  • Local Integration: We utilized ML integrations to parse conversational logic directly to our SwiftUI frontend through local Gemma.

Challenges we ran into

  • Model Integration: Zetic integration and choosing the right model took substantial time.
  • Intent Capturing: Reliable intent capturing was tricky. We had to carefully nudge users in productive directions while balancing AI performance with fast generation speeds.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Rapid Development: We are incredibly proud of going from ideation to a working app in such a short time.
  • Accessibility & Focus: We can see this app being extremely useful for people with attention deficit disorders, and people who are often working in isolation and therefore get distracted due to boredom.
  • Visual Appeal: We hope that others find the embodied character animations to be as cute as we do!
  • Technical Innovation: Technically, we're extremely proud of coming up with an enriched deterministic dialogue engine that combines with LLMs conversational capabilities to emulate a conversational yet controlled dialogue.
  • Feature Design: Featurewise we are very proud of finding a way to give the companion a persona through its ‘daily log’. By translating user’s wins to rewards for the companion, we reinforce user’s bond with the companion and keep things interesting.

What we learned

We learned how to orchestrate complex dialogue states, balancing deterministic UI flows with unpredictable LLM generation.

What's next for Karuna

  • User Testing: Giving Karuna to real users to test our dialogue flows!
  • Engine Refinement: We plan to refine the dialogue engine and add more distinct AI personas.
  • Expanded Narrative: Create immense narrative depth for the text-based logs so your pet's virtual world feels endlessly expansive.

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