Helpen • John Sietsma

My mum is losing her central vision so my siblings and I built her an AI voice assistant. We called it Helpen, Dutch for “to help”.

My sister's design: ebbing light and colour, because low vision doesn't mean no vision.

How it’s built

App: React Native and Expo, deployed to iOS and Android outside the App Store. Almost no screen, just light, colour and a few tones.
Voice: VAPI runs the call, speech and LLM in the cloud.
Backend: a Python API on AWS Lambda. It started as an MCP server, which still runs locally so the family’s scenarios work as integration tests against Ollama.
Storage: no database. Todoist holds the notes and tasks, and its notifications reach the family’s phones.

The full story, and what we learnt about designing for voice: We made mum an AI voice assistant.