Kira 🐰 — AI Agent for the Speech and Hearing Impaired

Built for the Amazon Nova AI Hackathon 2026

Kira is an Android mobile app that gives people who are deaf or have speech impairments a real voice — reading signs, classifying sounds, detecting danger, and speaking for them using Amazon Nova Lite, Nova Sonic, and Amazon Polly.

Live Demo

• Nova Sonic Server: https://kira-sonic-server.onrender.com
• Server Repo: https://github.com/obooks29/kira-sonic-server

Features

• My Voice — Type or sign to speak, powered by Nova multimodal + Amazon Polly neural TTS
• My Ears — Continuous sound detection with Nova AI enrichment and name detection
• My World — Nova scene analysis reads aloud what the camera sees
• My Safety — Nova writes personalised emergency SMS dispatched in 2 seconds
• Talk — Two-way conversation assistant with Nova quick replies
• Caregiver Dashboard — Daily Nova AI summaries for caregivers and family
• BunnieAgent — 4-step autonomous agentic emergency pipeline

Tech Stack

• React Native 0.73 (Android)
• Amazon Nova Lite (amazon.nova-lite-v1:0)
• Amazon Nova 2 Sonic (amazon.nova-2-sonic-v1:0)
• Amazon Polly (Joanna, neural)
• AWS Bedrock (us-east-1)
• Custom AWS Signature V4 (no SDK)
• Node.js WebSocket proxy server

Setup

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• Android Studio + Android SDK
• AWS account with IAM user having AmazonBedrockFullAccess + AmazonPollyFullAccess

Installation

git clone https://github.com/obooks29/kira-app.git
cd kira-app
npm install

Configure AWS credentials

Create src/services/aws-config.js:

export const AWS_REGION           = 'us-east-1';
export const BEDROCK_ENDPOINT     = `https://bedrock-runtime.${AWS_REGION}.amazonaws.com`;
export const AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID     = 'YOUR_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID';
export const AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = 'YOUR_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY';

Run

# Window 1
npx react-native start --port 8083

# Window 2
npx react-native run-android --port 8083

Architecture

React Native App
       ↓
AWS Bedrock (Nova Lite) — intelligence features
       ↓
Nova Sonic Proxy Server (Render)
       ↓
Amazon Polly — neural voice (Joanna)
       ↓
react-native-video — audio playback

Nova Sonic Server

The proxy server handles the Nova 2 Sonic bidirectional streaming protocol. Deploy your own: https://github.com/obooks29/kira-sonic-server

Hackathon

Amazon Nova AI Hackathon 2026 — Category: Multimodal Understanding #AmazonNova