[hassan1731996]

What does this Ability do?

A daily check-in for someone who lives alone, such as an older parent, with a short evening email for their family. At set times the speaker asks one warm question and understands the answer. A missed check-in gets one gentle retry, then an email to family. A mention of a fall, chest pain or trouble breathing gets a spoken "please call..." prompt and an urgent email. The evening digest says answered or missed, a mood word, any worry types and only the news the person was happy to share. It never sends a transcript.

Amazon retired Alexa Together, and what's left elsewhere only reports that the device was used. This is the "check in on an elderly resident" use case from OpenHome's spatial intelligence post. It's not an emergency service, and the README and first-run speech say so.

How it differs from existing abilities

• medication-reminder reminds about pills. This asks how the person is and closes the loop with family.
• panic-protocol calls contacts when the user asks for help. This notices when they don't answer, or mention a worry without asking, and points to panic-protocol for emergencies.
• KindMind and celebration-engine talk only to the user.

Suggested Trigger Words

• check in
• check-in
• I'm here
• check-in settings
• what have you told my family

Scheduled check-ins need no trigger. The background daemon asks at the set times.

Type

• New community Ability
• Improvement to existing Ability
• Bug fix
• Documentation update

External APIs

• No external APIs
• Uses external API(s): Gmail API (users/me/messages/send) through the linked Google account (get_token("google")). SMTP through send_email() is the fallback, with the optional keys checkin_sender_email / checkin_sender_password. Family recipients come from the checkin_family_emails key.

Testing

• Tested in OpenHome Live Editor
• All exit paths tested (said "stop", "exit", etc.)
• Error scenarios tested (API down, bad input, etc.): storage read failure, Gmail failure with SMTP fallback, malformed LLM JSON and no recipients set are covered in offline tests.

Checklist

• Files are in community/check-in-companion/
• main.py follows SDK pattern (extends MatchingCapability, has register_capability + call)
• README.md included with description, suggested triggers, and setup
• resume_normal_flow() called on every exit path
• No print() — using editor_logging_handler
• No hardcoded API keys — using placeholders
• No blocked imports (redis, user_config)
• No asyncio.sleep() or asyncio.create_task() — using session_tasks
• Error handling on all external calls
• Tested in OpenHome Live Editor

Anything else?

Design notes, following earlier review feedback

• Daemon: background_daemon_mode is set before CapabilityWorker(self). The daemon polls every 60s, never awaits user_response() and never calls resume_normal_flow(). It reads answers from get_full_message_history() on its next poll.
• Storage: state is kept in Context Storage (checkin_state). Saves use create_key then update_key and check success. A failed read skips the poll, so it can never wipe data. A checkin_busy key keeps the daemon out while the skill is open.
• Conversation:
  • Intents are routed by an LLM.
  • Confirmations go through an LLM classifier that allows a change ("no, make it ten").
  • Exit is checked at every prompt, including nested ones, by matching the whole utterance. "I'm good" and "nothing" count as check-in answers, not exits.
  • Times are spoken as "7 in the evening", never as 24-hour times.
• Profile: the name is read only from user_profile.md / user_summary.md, which are never written. User text is nonce-fenced as untrusted in every prompt.
• Logs: event types only, never words, names or email addresses.
• Agent hint: checkin_context.md is written (delete then write) only while a question is open, so the Agent answers warmly and gives no medical advice.

[github-actions]

🔀 Branch Merge Check

PR direction: add-check-in-companion → dev

✅ Passed — add-check-in-companion → dev is a valid merge direction

[github-actions]

✅ Community PR Path Check — Passed

All changed files are inside the community/ folder. Looks good!

[github-actions]

✅ Ability Validation Passed

📋 Validating: community/check-in-companion
  ✅ All checks passed!

[github-actions]

🔍 Lint Results

✅ __init__.py — Empty as expected

Files linted: community/check-in-companion/background.py community/check-in-companion/main.py

✅ Flake8 — Passed

✅ All checks passed!