Quacky

Video Demo

About this project

🦆 Quacky - your friendly desktop duck Quacky is an AI sidekick that lives in your Mac's desktop, does the boring stuff - email, research, calendar - and quacks when it needs you. You stay in flow; the duck does the busywork. 💡 Inspiration
Most AI agents either live in a chat window you babysit, or hijack your screen - stealing your mouse and locking you out while they "work." Neither feels like a teammate. We wanted an assistant that works alongside you, invisibly, and only taps your shoulder when it matters - like a helpful colleague at the next desk, except this one's a duck. 🐤 What it does
A mascot in your menu-bar notch. You type or speak a task and the duck waddles off: * ✉️ Sends email - after you OK it. Drafts in your voice; calendar-aware, so it declines on conflicts instead of "let me check." * 🔎 Web research & summaries - point it at a topic or subreddit; it browses, reads, and returns a tidy summary. * 📅 Works your Google stack - Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets. * 🎙️ Talks back with a natural ElevenLabs voice - only when it counts. * 🦆 Shows its status at a glance: snoozing, digging in, all-ears, ta-da. 🏗️ How we built it
Our proudest bit is the architecture: Quacky runs across two macOS profiles. Profile A (your session) hosts the orchestrator brain (FastAPI) and the SwiftUI notch app; Profile B is a private, headless session where the agent works - so it never touches your screen. The brain is Google Gemini: it understands intent, plans multi-step tasks, drafts content, and routes each - direct Google APIs first, then headless browsing (Playwright + Chrome DevTools Protocol), then gated desktop control. We discovered macOS sends synthetic input to the foreground session, so a background agent can hijack yours - so we built a fail-closed gate that keeps the duck inside Profile B, and even stream its screen into the notch so you can watch it work. 🚀 What's next: code-signed distribution, richer memory, and a few more quacks.

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