Ilan LenznerAI developer · design engineer
עברית
We replaced the living-room streamer and the old Xiaomi box ended up in my room. One night later it was a wall dashboard, a home AI with a sense of humor, and a remote that lives in my phone.
See it work
Filmed on my Mac in demo mode: the mail, calendar and news on the TV are demo data. Sound on for the voice.
What it became
Weather, mail, calendar, news and the state of the house, rotating on the TV. Five screens drawn for a 960 px browser on a box with 2 GB of RAM.
Ask from the phone, the TV answers out loud. It sees what the dashboard sees, remembers earlier conversations, jokes a little, and can put something on YouTube.
The AI, a full remote and every app on the box, installed from the phone's home screen. It even knows what is playing right now.
On the TV
The pages rotate on their own. The remote's arrows switch them, OK holds one, arrow down opens the AI.
In the phone
A home-screen app with three tabs. When the TV is busy with YouTube or Netflix, the AI answers from the phone instead of talking over the show.
How it works
A small server on my Mac collects everything, talks to Claude, makes the voice and drives the box over adb. The phone reaches it privately through Tailscale.
What fought back
The plan was to talk into the remote. The voice key always opens Google Assistant, and the remote only streams sound while that key is held, so an app of its own hears silence. I proved it with a test build before giving up on it.
Speech moved to the phone. Chrome only allows the microphone on https, so the server sits behind a private Tailscale https address.
The first voice had dropouts, like bad reception. The box was analysing the audio live and painting waves on a canvas while it played, with 120 MB of free memory.
The Mac measures the loudness of each answer ahead of time. The box downloads the clip whole and only moves a CSS transform. The dropouts went away.
It started on my public voice twin, which speaks as me to visitors. At home that felt wrong: it pitched itself and called the room the living room.
A separate home personality on Claude: honest, a bit funny, reads my calendar and mail. The public twin was not touched.
"Put on some lo-fi" opens YouTube, which pushes the AI off the screen in the middle of its own sentence.
Actions that take the screen wait until the voice ends. If the TV is already busy with a show, the answer plays on the phone.
"Three hours of quiet piano, coming up. If it puts you to sleep before the ten o'clock review, that's on you."
Under the hood