Zero-Assist Devlog #4 — The Phone Is Now a Personal Chat Server
so Devlog 4 is here.

The main thing i fixed this time is the channels section of the app. channels are basically how Zero-Assist can gets input or give output to other app — like Telegram, WhatsApp, and other messaging apps. once you connect them, the app starts listening.
but whats different now that channels are working, the phone isn’t just an AI assistant anymore. it’s your personal home server that you can message like a real in-person.
what this actually means in practice:
say you’re away and you message your own Telegram bot: “water the plants” — Zero-Assist picks that up, figures out what you mean, and either goes with an MQTT signal to your smart home setup or directly talks to your microcontroller over USB or BLE , whichever is available. no extra apps, no cloud, just your phone doing the work.
same idea works for your homelab. you can message “ping my website” and the app will run the actual shell command on your phone and report back. this does need a one-time manual connection to set up, but after that it just works.
basically the phone becomes a chat-controlled home automation that you own fully here is no cloud included except the llm , which you can also use the local llm .
what i’m planning to add next:
i’m planning a live dashboard screen for this — not raw logs, but a simplified readable feed. something like:
“message received via Telegram → running plant watering command → sent MQTT signal ✓”
the idea is it’s useful for people who like seeing what’s happening here, but written in plain language instead of technical stuff for the normal users .
the hard part this time was :
most of the time on this devlog went into connecting the Rust backend (which handles all the channel logic) to the Kotlin front-end of the app , so getting them to work together cleanly took a lot of debugging and was honestly the most frustrating part of this whole update. got it working though.
more soon.