Geoffrey Litt demonstrates that creating an effective, personalized digital assistant can be achieved with minimal DIY effort, thanks to today’s accessible tools. Meet Stevens, the AI assistant that provides Litt’s family with useful daily briefings. The backend is surprisingly simple, consisting of a single SQLite table and a few cron jobs.
How Stevens Works
Stevens sends daily briefs via Telegram, including calendar events, appointments, weather updates, reminders, and a fun fact. The assistant isn’t limited to sending information; users can add new entries or ask questions about existing items through Telegram. While rudimentary, Litt finds Stevens far more useful than mainstream AI assistants like Siri.
The architecture is straightforward: a notebook (the SQLite table) stores entries populated from various sources, including Google calendars, a weather API, delivery notices, and Telegram conversations. With these entries and their relevance dates, generating a daily brief is simple, especially when leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for natural language handling and formatting.
Benefits of a Customized AI Assistant
Litt’s experiment highlights the advantages of having an assistant tailored to one’s specific needs. Unlike generic digital assistants designed to serve their creators’ interests, a personal AI can be given its own personality and focus on what matters most to the user. Even a minimally informed assistant like Stevens proves to be super useful, and Litt encourages others to explore his project to experience the benefits firsthand.
