Vera

Overview

Vera is an iOS app, written in Swift, for planning a day by talking. You tap the mic, Vera greets you with a health briefing (recovery score, sleep, HRV), you talk through what you need to get done, it asks follow-up questions, and it organizes the day into prioritized time blocks. The finished plan is written to Google Calendar. There is a Siri shortcut, "Hey Siri, start planning", so the phone never needs to be looked at.

Problem

Planning apps assume you want to type into a list. The best time to plan is the first few minutes after waking, when typing is the last thing anyone wants to do, and when the plan should depend on how the body actually slept.

Approach

- On-device speech: speech recognition and text to speech both run on the phone, so no audio leaves the device and the whole latency budget goes to the model
- Model with a fallback: Groq running llama-3.3-70b as the primary, OpenRouter as the fallback when Groq rate-limits
- Health context in the greeting: Whoop (OAuth2, API v2) for recovery, strain, HRV and sleep performance; Apple HealthKit for HRV, resting heart rate and sleep
- Calendar both ways: today's events are read for conflict detection, and the finalized plan is written back
- A session state machine: VoiceSessionManager owns the conversation state, which is what keeps a voice-only interface from talking over the user

Key Decisions

- Voice only, no fallback keyboard: the constraint forced the turn-taking and confirmation design to actually work instead of hiding behind a text field.
- Health data first: the briefing is the first thing you hear, so the plan starts from what the day can realistically hold.

Status

Runs from source through Xcode on iOS 17+. Not on the App Store.