Local-first office resident prototype
Can an embodied assistant know when a room has changed without becoming surveillance?
SENTRY is a single-room office prototype for grounded household intelligence. It uses the existing Windows PC, webcam, microphone, speakers, and local storage to maintain conservative presence and event history, expose that state to a conversational assistant, and speak proactively only when a useful event survives its policy gates.
Blog entries on recent progress from the researchers
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SENTRY’s first question is deliberately narrow: can one continuously running Windows system tell whether the office is empty, occupied, degraded, or offline; maintain entry and exit sessions; recognize the enrolled user conservatively; and make that grounded state queryable by an assistant? The prototype should earn expansion through reliability rather than hardware accumulation.
A stable event pipeline runs from physical observation to semantic event, contextual enrichment, deterministic eligibility gates, optional judgment, speech or silence, and a recorded decision. Deduplication, cooldowns, interruption budgets, confidence thresholds, and current speaking state all matter; silence is a valid result.
SENTRY receives source-linked context through ANIMA, but the event path still has unresolved delivery, liveness, and reasoning boundaries. Automatic polling, speech, and unattended delivery remain off until those handoffs are corrected and validated with genuine household sources.
SENTRY is a local office-resident prototype, not a security camera, alarm, medical monitor, emergency system, or claim of whole-home intelligence.
Read the source record in Notion ↗