Wick lives on the one screen an older person already watches for more than four hours a day, and asks her to install nothing, learn nothing and wear nothing. She answers with one button on the remote she already holds, and the family sees only what she has agreed to share.
No account and no hardware needed. Try the demo makes you Sarah, her daughter, in a demo home.
Disclaimer: her television in a browser tab is for quick testing only. Wick is a Fire TV app: judge it on the Vega Virtual Device or the Fire OS build in the Android TV emulator, as we did (Setup), or on a Fire TV. We ran it on a real Fire TV Stick 4K Select.
The idea
A phone app full of alerts, checked by a daughter three hundred miles away. Wick lives instead on the screen she already watches for more than four hours a day (BLS American Time Use Survey, 2025), and she stays in charge.
The people in the demo. Margaret lives alone. Sarah, her daughter, lives far away. Maria is her carer. Try the demo makes you Sarah.
What it does
A ring at the door puts a card on her television in about two seconds, then the doorbell's picture and one plain sentence about who is there. If another app is in front, Wick still tells her: a system toast on Vega, a notification on Fire OS. Only the door may interrupt.
Sarah asks Alexa+ "How's Mum been this week?" and gets a short, honest answer. Notes go to Margaret's television and wait for a natural break; she replies with one button.
Wick learns what a normal week looks like in this house, so it stays quiet when nothing is wrong and can say "that's up from last week" and mean it.
When she is watching another app. No app can draw over another on Vega or Fire OS, so Wick's cards appear only while Wick is on screen. The door still reaches her over anything: a system toast on Vega, a heads-up on Fire OS. A note never interrupts. On Fire OS it waits quietly in the Notification Center, never over her programme; Vega has no quiet place to leave it, so it waits in Wick. Either way it is on her screen the moment she opens Wick.
Features
Every one has a rule that protects her, enforced in code.
Her home screen opens on her: "Good morning, Margaret.", the date, and who is coming, such as "Maria usually comes tomorrow at 9 am." The films are under it.
Never says anyone came, or shows a visit the door has not been told of.
One button on the door card asks Sarah to look at the same picture. Sarah's answer appears under her name.
Never shows Sarah the door unless Margaret asks.
When a day is unusual, such as the carer not coming, Wick asks Margaret first and shows her the exact sentence it would send.
Never tells the family anything she keeps to herself.
A note waits for the credits, a pause, or a quiet cut measured in the film itself. The film holds while she reads it. See the map.
Never interrupts a scene. No model chooses the moment.
Sarah invites her to a film. When Margaret presses Start the film, Sarah's screen follows hers.
Never lets anyone else touch her remote.
Sarah sees one thing about today: whether Margaret's day has begun. Margaret can put it out.
Never says when, where or what. Her home screen shows who looked in.
Holding OK for two seconds asks one person to ring her. If they don't answer in three minutes, the next person is asked.
Never calls anyone itself or raises an alarm.
After the carer leaves, the television asks: "Maria was here from 9:02 to 9:47. Is this right?"
Never treats a visit as confirmed until she says so.
Sarah can connect her own Fire TV. It shows Margaret's light, door requests, the week and shared films.
Never becomes Margaret's television or sees more than Sarah may.
Sarah can ask for Spanish. Nothing changes until Margaret says yes on her own screen.
Never machine-translates a sentence she consents by.
Sarah sends a picture. Margaret can keep it, and kept pictures fill her idle screen.
Never tells Sarah whether she kept it.
Play reads the card on screen aloud, in her language (Amazon Polly).
Never speaks unless she asks.
Larger text, at 40-point minimum, and higher contrast, at 21:1, across every screen.
Never shrinks a word to make it fit.
Sarah says "The plumber is coming Thursday at ten — let Mum know." Wick's agent shows her the plan; after her yes, a note waits for Margaret's natural break, the door card later says "Sarah arranged a visit for about now", Margaret is reminded that morning, and Sarah is told when the door rang or that nobody came.
Never says the plumber came. It says someone rang around then; whether it was them is Margaret's to say.
Sarah sends the doctor a link. On the step the doctor presses I'm at the door, and Margaret's television says "Doctor Rossi is at your door. They confirmed it on their phone just now." A ring nobody expected says "You don't have to open."
Never tells her she can open, shows the visitor anything about her, or lets a model decide who is there.
Margaret's week, written by agents from counted facts and checked twice, ends with one thing Sarah could do, with one button: write a note, arrange a visit or watch a film together.
Never guesses how she feels, or suggests anything the week's facts don't support.
The family reaches all of it through 26 MCP tools, and through an agent on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore that uses those same tools with the family member's own token and asks before every write. Every call checks again that Margaret still allows that person.
See it
Taken against the deployed system. The televisions are simulators and the home is a demo home.
Her daughter's side
Sarah talks to Wick the way she would talk to Alexa+. Everything she reads comes from Wick's tools, through the Guardian.
Recorded on the deployed system, in a demo home. Waits are shown at double speed.
Try it
No account and no hardware are needed.
Disclaimer: her television in a browser tab is for quick testing only. Wick is a Fire TV app: judge it on the Vega Virtual Device or the Fire OS build in the Android TV emulator, as we did (Setup), or on a Fire TV. We ran it on a real Fire TV Stick 4K Select.
The keyboard is the remote: arrows move, Enter is OK, Esc is Back, Space is Play/Pause, and Enter held for two seconds is Hold for Sarah.
Her television · quick testIn the family app, choose Try the demo and enter the code shown on the television, or point a phone at the QR code beside it. Each press is a new demo session, with six weeks of simulated history.
Family appOn the television, press Allow Sarah when it appears, about twenty seconds after pairing. Then ask the family app anything, for example "How has my mum been this week?"
The note waits. Pause, or let Big Buck Bunny reach its calm point at 1:29, and it appears. Space reads it aloud; Enter replies.
In the family app, choose who is there. The door card appears at once and the film waits under it, then the picture and one sentence about it.
The same flow runs on the Vega Virtual Device and on the Fire OS build in the Android TV emulator (docs/SETUP.md).
How it is built
The edge authenticates and answers Ring within its five-second budget. The agents do the reasoning. All of it is in Terraform, deployed by GitHub Actions over OIDC.
Wickapps/, services/ or infra/, and the counts are Terraform's. Open the diagram.w3cmedia plays the films and the door's live view, and Content Personalization is told what she watches as she watches it.MediaSession, so "Alexa, pause" and the remote's media keys go through the same rules as on Vega.| Doorbell to door card | 2.3 s median, on the stand-in doorbell (Ring's own webhook hop is extra) |
| Launch to fully drawn, Vega | 722 ms mean, 632–807 ms, over 10 cold starts on the Vega Virtual Device |
| Memory on her home screen, Vega | 64 MiB PSS, steady over a minute, on the Vega Virtual Device |
| MCP server's own work | 18 ms p95 |
| MCP call on an open connection | 230–241 ms p95, against Alexa+'s 500 ms target |
New connections are slower because App Runner closes idle connections (#47).
Wick needs a trusted screen in the room, a doorbell with a real developer API, and an assistant the family already uses. Only Amazon has all three.
| Company | Screen | Doorbell API | Assistant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | Fire TV | Ring | Alexa+ |
| Google TV | Nest (limited) | Gemini | |
| Apple | Apple TV | none | Siri |
| Roku | Roku | none | none |
Privacy and trust
Ring is used at the front door only.
On her own television, and she can remove it. She reaches it at any time from her light on the home screen, and can stop Wick there: everything it keeps about her home is deleted, and her family's app says so.
Health, money, relationships and location, under any setting. A deterministic content gate, the Guardian, also checks every string a family member reads against a written list, and property tests run it through the real tool paths. It catches what the list names.
No mood detection, no wellness scores, no fall detection, no chatbot on the television. The reasons are in docs/WICK.md §6.
What is real, and what is simulated
Everything between those ends: the AWS stack, the MCP server, the agents and models, the Guardian, accounts and pairing.
Not yet seen on real hardware: a Ring doorbell, or a spoken "Alexa, pause".
Read more
What it does, who it is for, and why.
Architecture, security, the threat model and measurements.
Running it locally, on the simulators, or on your own AWS account.
Every platform gap, written when it was hit.
Each tool Wick used, with the evidence from the friction log.
Where in each film a note may arrive, measured and chosen by rule.
Accessible 10-foot components for Vega, open source and on npm.
Submitted to Build, Ship, Shape, the Amazon Developer Hackathon. Fire TV track, with the AWS Builder and Open Source mini challenges.