Helios

What is Helios?

Helios is my personal AI assistant and command center for daily life. It’s a self-hosted web application that ties together smart home control, wellness tracking, financial monitoring, task management, and more — all through a conversational AI interface. I can interact with Helios through its web UI or via Telegram, including sending photos for analysis on the go.

At its core, Helios is about having a single intelligent system that knows my context, remembers my goals, and proactively helps me stay on track.

The Dashboard

The dashboard is the central hub. At a glance it shows weather, currently playing music, server and desktop machine health (CPU, temperature, storage), quick links to self-hosted services, and the status of key integrations like Home Assistant, Frigate, and AdGuard. It’s the “mission control” view — everything important at a glance.

AI Assistant

The assistant panel is where I talk to Helios directly. It remembers prior conversations, understands context, and has full access to the Home Assistant API — so I can say things like “turn on the living room lights” or “what’s the tire pressure on my car?” and get an actual response backed by real data.

Beyond the web UI, Helios is also available over Telegram. I can message it photos and ask questions about them, get proactive reminders, or control my home from anywhere. It supports web searches and image analysis, so it’s not limited to just what it already knows.

The assistant logs all conversations, and there’s even a conversation import feature — drop .md exports from ChatGPT or Grok into a folder and Helios will import them, extracting memories and context automatically.

Memory System

One of the most interesting pieces of Helios is its memory architecture. It has three layers:

• Semantic memory — long-term knowledge extracted from conversations, stored as embeddings for retrieval
• Conversational context — recent interactions that inform the tone and continuity of responses
• Entity extraction via Neo4j — a knowledge graph that maps relationships between people, places, topics, and events

The Memory Explorer (the “Mind” panel) visualizes these memories as an interactive map. You can click into any memory node to see what it relates to, how it connects to other memories, and when it was formed. It’s a fascinating way to see how an AI builds a model of your life over time.

Home Control

The Home panel provides direct control over smart home entities through Home Assistant. Lights in each room can be toggled on and off, room climate data (temperature, humidity) is displayed in real time, and there’s a power consumption overview showing total draw across the house, broken down by device category.

It also surfaces vehicle data — battery level, mileage, tire pressures — pulled from Home Assistant integrations. Basically anything HA can see, Helios can display and control.

Wellness Tracking

Helios tracks wellness data logged through Home Assistant. The sleep panel shows nightly duration, quality scores, 30-day trends, and individual session breakdowns. The water tracking panel monitors daily intake against a target, with a 14-day history chart and summary stats.

This data feeds into Helios’ proactive behavior — if it notices I haven’t logged water intake or sleep seems off, it can mention it or adjust its daily briefing accordingly.

Habits

The habit tracker is where Helios gets proactive. It tracks exercises (pushups, pull-ups, ab wheel, etc.), mindfulness practices (meditation), and general habits (making the bed). Each habit shows streak data, a 6-month history heatmap, and completion rates.

If I haven’t logged my pushups for the day, Helios will remind me — over Telegram if needed. It tracks streaks and progress toward building consistency, turning the AI from a passive tool into an active accountability partner.

Investing

The investing page tracks portfolio value over time, with views into precious metals, cryptocurrencies, and individual stock positions. It pulls live price data, shows daily changes, and supports configurable alerts — so Helios can notify me when a position hits a target or drops below a threshold.

Spirituality

A dedicated space for meditation logging and mindfulness practice. It tracks session history, displays stats over time, and supports different meditation types. The page opens with a rotating inspirational quote — a small touch, but it sets the right tone.

System & AI Management

The system page is the behind-the-scenes view of Helios itself. It shows compute usage, API costs, token budgets, and the status of background tasks. The “Proactive Behavior” section is particularly interesting — these are scheduled actions Helios takes on its own: morning briefings, todo reminders, portfolio alerts, self-improvement suggestions, and habit nudges.

Below that is the agent and task queue system, where Helios manages longer-running research tasks like generating investment reports or analyzing data.

Todos

A full kanban board for task management, with columns for Now, Soon, Later, and Someday. Tasks can be tagged by category and priority. There’s also a calendar view for date-based planning. Helios incorporates these into its daily briefings — surfacing what’s due, what’s overdue, and what I should focus on next.

More Features

Beyond what’s shown in the panels above, Helios also includes:

• Journal — daily entries and dream logging, searchable and timestamped
• Book Tracker — logs books as started, finished, abandoned, or to-read
• Bill Tracking — warns when bills are due soon or haven’t been paid
• Security Camera — can snap a photo from a security camera and send it over Telegram on demand
• Daily Briefings — motivational messages, daily todos, habit progress, and upcoming deadlines delivered each morning
• Investment Alerts — configurable notifications for portfolio changes

What’s Next

Helios v1 has been a fantastic tool for managing daily life, but I’m now working on v2. More details on what’s changing and what’s new are coming soon.