While You're Out

For judges

Sixty seconds, then five minutes.

Thank you for looking. Here is the whole idea, the shortest path through it, and an honest account of what is real.

IN SIXTY SECONDS

What, who, why

  1. The problem. Every time parents go out, someone else holds their child's safety: a babysitter, a grandparent, a nanny. What they need to know lives on a fridge note, in a WhatsApp thread and in a parent's head, and the questions come at the worst moments.
  2. The add-on. The Echo Show in the kitchen becomes the sitter's guide for the evening, in the parents' own words. Questions the notes don't answer go to the parents' phones and the answer comes back. In an emergency it reads the family's own plan, one step at a time, and keeps going when the internet drops.
  3. Why it's different. Safety is enforced in code, not a prompt: never "it's safe", never a dose, emergencies first, the address shown and never spoken. Measured on 357 things a sitter might say, with the first run on 120 lines another AI wrote without seeing ours (85%) reported as the honest number.
  4. Why Alexa+. It uses what makes Alexa+ add-ons more than chat: MCP Apps cards on the Echo Show, tasks that wait for a person, elicitation for a form and for paying on the parent's phone, and a house that knows the doorbell and the TV.

IN FIVE MINUTES

The shortest path

Or start with the 3-minute video: the whole evening, with the emergency at 1:16. How it was built, and what testing taught me, is in the build story on dev.to.

1 minOpen the highlights in the live demo: the knock at the door, a parent's answer, the emergency and goodnight, hands-free in 2½ minutes (or go straight to the emergency). Scan the QR code to be Mom on your phone.
1 minAsk it yourself: "Can Maya have chicken satay?", then "Her lips are swelling", then "done".
1 minSkim Safety: the rules, the numbers, and what I say they don't prove.
1 minLook at every screen, switching between Echo devices at the top.
1 minRead COMPLIANCE.md: each Alexa+ rule with the test that proves it.

HONESTLY

Real, and stand-ins

Alexa+ add-on registration isn't open yet (its console says "Coming Soon"), so the Alexa+ host is my simulator. Everything else is built against the interface the real service would use.

real The MCP server and its 23 tools · the Echo Show card · the safety rules · the parent's phone with Web Push · the sitter's phone, offline · the add-on on today's Alexa through an Alexa-hosted skill · over 440 tests on every push

stand-in The Alexa+ host (my open-source simulator) · the Ring doorbell · Amazon Pay · the delivery partner and store · Fire TV · Bee

real Six conversations with parents and carers in India, summarised with their agreement: what they said and what changed. A small, early signal; U.S. families are next.

THE PAPERS

Everything to check