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GuideBack

Screen Time tells you to stop. GuideBack remembers what you were trying to do—using Gemma 4 to turn intention drift into respectful, personalized guidance.

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Inspiration

GuideBack was inspired by watching my dad doomscroll on his phone.

He would pick up his phone to do something simple—call someone, check an important message, or look something up—and then 30 or 40 minutes later he would still be scrolling, sometimes completely disconnected from what he originally meant to do.

That made me realize something: Screen Time knows how long you've been on your phone, but it doesn't know why you picked it up in the first place.

GuideBack explores a different approach to digital wellbeing: instead of simply blocking an app or telling someone they have exceeded a time limit, it helps them recover their original intention.

What it does

GuideBack is an AI-powered intent-recovery companion for Android.

Users create intentions such as:

  • Call Anna
  • Refill a prescription
  • Reply to Marcus

GuideBack then evaluates phone-usage context using a deterministic Intent Drift Engine.

The engine considers signals such as:

  • session duration
  • expected usage
  • overdue intentions
  • repeated app switching
  • whether the current activity matches what the user intended to accomplish

When the drift score crosses a threshold, GuideBack sends a minimized, structured description of the situation to Gemma 4.

Gemma handles the human part of the interaction by generating a short, personalized, respectful intervention.

Instead of saying:

"You've reached your screen-time limit."

GuideBack can say:

"You've been here longer than usual. You wanted to call Anna. Want help getting back?"

The user stays in control. They can return to the intended task, snooze the reminder, or dismiss it.

Screen Time tells you to stop. GuideBack remembers what you were trying to do.

How I built it

GuideBack is a native Android application built with Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Material 3, and Gemma 4.

The architecture deliberately separates deterministic decision-making from generative AI:

User intention
      ↓
Usage context
      ↓
Intent Drift Engine
      ↓
Drift threshold
      ↓
Sanitized context
      ↓
Gemma 4
      ↓
Personalized intervention
      ↓
User action

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