This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend I built this for Jason, my boyfriend of 12 years — he's always on the go, has ADHD, and forgets things. He's not tech-friendly, so it had to be extra simple. For my very first app, I made him a quick voice-to-do list for everything he needs to remember throughout the day. No more carrying paper and pen (which he loses), no more texting me multiple times a day so I can remind him. It lives in our bubble, so his thoughts never pass through an external service — complete privacy.
A voice-first, distraction-free reminder app for ADHD-friendly workflows.
One button. Talk. Reminders appear. Done.
No settings, no menus, no friction.
All inference is local. No API keys. No closed services.
I used open-source AI I'm familiar with: faster-whisper for speech-to-text and Gemma 3 for extracting the reminders. They're both open-weight models — Whisper's weights are from OpenAI, Gemma's are from Google — so there are no API calls and no black boxes. There's no agent harness because it's a pipeline, not an agent. You record your voice, it transcribes, extracts the reminder, and displays it. When you're done, it deletes.
I used Flask for the backend and Ollama for serving Gemma locally. Everything runs locally because privacy was the whole point. The models download once, then no internet is needed. Jason just opens it on his phone and uses it whenever.
The whole app exists because it needed to be personal for Jason. He always has his phone. His privacy is everything, so it costs nothing to run. We can swap models as his needs change, and build on it. I run the whole thing on a small server I manage.
Open innovation mattered because Jason's voice — his actual words — never gets sent to a third-party AI service. Everything runs on models I control, safeguarded for him. There are zero API costs, so he can use it as much as he wants, say as much as he wants, delete and change things as needed, without a bill building up.
If the models need upgrading — because Ollama releases a better version, or because Jason's needs change — it's a simple swap. It works offline, too. On days he's out of service or out of range, it still works. His data isn't shared with the wide world. Best Use of Gemma