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Comment by dhon_ | Hacker News Reader

As a parent with kids at three different schools, help keeping track of their schedules would be amazing.

Currently updates from the schools are spread over multiple sources: paper notes, email, sms, "news" and "calendar" in school app (which are not kept in sync), and Facebook. Different schools use different apps.

Additionally the channels are often noisy, with messages about groups my kids don't belong to, and "helpful tips" like how to pack healthy lunchboxes. These notifications come in during the day while I'm working, get dismissed due to the low SNR and then the useful ones often slip through unnoticed.

Definitely an area that is ripe for disruption, but as others here have commented, I don't feel confident about Google being the provider.

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My wife and I have been working exactly on this for some time now. We are building a companion for families to help you keep your life, career, physical and mental health in order in the challenging times when you raise a family and are building your career.

We are running a small trial group right now to optimize the experience and see how people and real non-tech families react to this.

We are a tiny startup and our business is not data nor customer addiction. We will simply be charging our customers and put them at the center of our focus. We are honestly trying to understand what can genuinely be helpful to families and make all the innovations that we are seeing available to them.

This is not targeted to the HN crowd; yes, you can hack your assistant with a bunch of Claude/Codex automations and be happy! 100% possible and also fun to do. This is for everyone else that has no time/skills/intention to sit in front of a laptop for this.

I saw the post yesterday but decided to not write right away and wait for the post to slow down as we are supposed to be in a closed trial since each user costs us money right out of our pockets and there is no monetization yet.

But if someone is genuinely interested and wants to give it a try and keep in touch, here is the link:

https://empla.io/ai-employees/family-assistant

We are actively rolling out features and optimizing the experience all the time, so pardon the rough edges!

When I was a child, schools didn’t need to communicate on a daily, weekly (or even monthly) basis with parents. How times change. Heck, we went for a whole school day without having to talk to Mummy or Daddy. So this agent is technology to help the mess enabled by technology?

When you were a child you didn’t care (or weren’t aware) about your school’s communication with your parents. Can’t say that is surprising to me, you were a child.

Any thoughts on the subject as a parent with a child in school in the modern day? Or were you just eager to throw out a “back in my day”?

From hearsay, I hear that prestigious private schools tend to communicate very frequently, which manufactures value and evidence that the school has rich experiences for the students. And there may be a mutual expectation for parents to be "involved" in it, contrasted with families that require schools to serve as a childcare.

Referring to public schools as childcare is some elitist nonsense. Public education in United States has been destroyed by decades of attacks on it by politicians, sure. But referring to it as childcare is not productive. If education literally is serving that role, the responsibilities should be split because it would dilute the education experience.

It's sort of confusing though because all schools for children are by definition childcare, and you try to diminish the public variant.

>multiple sources

how about when a kid has 7 classes, and each teacher says to just check the google doc within google classroom where they each type daily notes into unstructured tables that are each different for each class oh and parents dont actually have their own google classroom login they are just supposed to log into the kids account.

Also, family management is so *fundamentally broken* that it's disheartening and almost laughable that priority is ai over global acl management. There should not be a separate parental control dashboard for roblox, fortnite, instagram, tiktok, etc etc etc etc. Every app should be REQUIRED to expose all parental controls in a standard protocol upstream to identity management that is manageable by multiple management accounts in a family unit. I should be able to go into settings, click a kid, turn off chat for a child, and it instantly updates on my partners phone without needing an account at the service itself to manage it and knowing the ins and outs of how their parental controls are evolving weekly. Family settings should exist ABOVE any single user account and apply to all accounts to any service linked within the family.

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