yo mom calling

Mom calling you (it will be on your phone
mom texting you
mom call description
mom looking at you

Inspiration

Being an adult and having less parental supervision can be freeing, but it can also make it easier get off task. Sometimes a little bit of parental pressure is what we need to get our work done. yo mom calling aims to bring that back.

What it does

Like a true helicopter parent, yo mom calling can read your google calendar, your trello tasklist, and even monitor your desktop screen to nag you about your responsibilities and call you out when you're not getting your work done. yo mom calling has a UI where you can configure your work sessions, view call transcripts, and much more. Whenever you get off task by pulling out your phone and doomscrolling during a work session, your mom will call you to check in on you.

How we built it

yo mom calling primarily uses Elevenlabs to stream an interactive conversational agent session over the phone. It places outbound voice calls over a Photon SIP trunk, and uses dynamic variables such as your name, the specific distraction that was detected, and what you're supposed to be doing right now to generate a personalized nag for the situation. It also uses Photon to send out frequent text messages to remind you of your duties.

For screen monitoring, we wrote a python detector to read the active window, and then prompt a decision from a model to determine whether or not our current activity is "off-task". We tried a few different model options (Gemini 3.5 Flash-lite, Jev 1.14, OpenAI luna-decisions, YOLO26 (local), Perceptron Mk1.5) and ultimately found that the Gemini had best accuracy. We use a similar process for monitoring your physical position via your webcam, taking periodic screenshots to detect if you're doing something unproductive like scrolling on your phone.

We also integrated several third party services such as google calendar, trello, and canvas to pull personal data about your tasks/deadlines, and this data is referred to during calls from your mom (for example: your mom may call you to remind you to work on an essay for a specific class).

The dashboard was built with as a react app with typescript.

Challenges we ran into

We worked a bit on fine tuning the definition of a distraction through experimentation. At first, it was not sensitive enough and wouldn't call us quickly enough even with very blatant off-tasking such as opening several instagram tabs. Experimentation with different models helped improve this accuracy there, but we also found that we needed to modify our system prompts a bit to include very specific examples of distraction (such as specific websites to not visit, etc.). We also found that the mom could be a bit too lenient at first, and we modified our system prompts as well to encourage the mom to be a bit harsher with things like comparisons to cousins and such.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The mom sounds realistic and the dialogue it uses are not only accurate to user-specific details but also quite funny. The interactive session makes the whole experience feel even more like having a real mom check in on your work, and this is something that most importantly, makes this something that is fun to use.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how interactive phone agents work, as this was our first time really using this kind of tool. It was very impressive and if anything we learned about how capable these tools really are at holding a real time conversation.

What's next for yo mom calling

The idea is that yo mom calling would be integrated as a background app on your desktop, which not only functions during specifically launched work sessions but also on a regular daily basis to remind your of your tasks first thing in the morning, so that you feel that someone is always watching your daily choices.