Obligate

Say it in a meeting, Obligate tracks it.

▶ Watch the demo video (2:42) · Devpost project · Friction log

Obligate is an MCP server for Alexa+ that listens for the promises people make in meetings ("I'll send the contract by Friday", "we need to renew the SOC 2 report") and turns them into tracked obligations with an owner, a deadline and a risk level. It catches the commitments nobody owns, the ones that were asked but never confirmed, and the ones that touch contracts, audits, privacy, security or money, before they turn into costly mistakes.

Built for the Alexa+ track of Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon 2026.

• MCP server, Streamable HTTP transport, MCP spec 2025-11-25 (also negotiates newer versions)

• 7 voice-first tools, each returning a speech line written to be read aloud, plus structured data

• Live dashboard for screens (Echo Show, laptop, team TV)

• Voice console (/voice) that simulates the Alexa+ experience in the browser over real MCP calls

• Amazon Bedrock (Converse API) extraction for messy transcripts, with an offline rules engine as fallback

Why

Most meeting tools give you a transcript or a summary. Neither one tells you that the invoice nobody volunteered to pay is now a day late, or that "I'll try to update the incident policy, maybe" isn't really a commitment. The cost of a dropped promise isn't the task itself. It's the missed renewal, the failed audit, the breached SLA.

Obligate treats every spoken commitment as an obligation and scores its risk:

Related MCP server: Follow-Through

Talk to it

You: Alexa, wrap up the meeting. Alexa: I captured 8 commitments from the vendor review. 3 are high risk. Most urgent: Raj needs to send the renewal contract to legal, due tomorrow. That one is compliance-sensitive (contract, legal, renewal). 2 have no owner. Want me to assign them?

You: Give the SOC 2 report to Priya by November 14. Alexa: Done. Priya needs to renew the SOC 2 report before the customer audit, due November 14. Risk dropped from high to medium.

You: What could go wrong? Alexa: 2 high-risk items. First, nobody owns: pay the Q3 invoice to Acme, 1 day overdue…

Architecture

flowchart LR
    A[Alexa+ / any MCP client] -- Streamable HTTP /mcp --> S[Obligate MCP server]
    V[Voice console /voice] -- JSON-RPC over Streamable HTTP --> S
    S --> E{Extractor}
    E -- OBLIGATE_LLM=bedrock --> B[Amazon Bedrock Converse API]
    E -- default / fallback --> R[Rules engine]
    S --> K[Risk scorer]
    S --> D[(SQLite)]
    D --> W[Live dashboard /]

MCP tools

Read-only tools carry readOnlyHint annotations; write tools are marked non-destructive. Resource: obligate://obligations/open.

Quick start

git clone <this repo> && cd obligate
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

OBLIGATE_DEMO=1 python3 -m obligate.server

• Dashboard: http://localhost:8000/

• Voice console: http://localhost:8000/voice (use Chrome for voice input). Click Play sample meeting, then Wrap up the meeting.

• MCP endpoint: http://localhost:8000/mcp

Run the tests (with the server running for the end-to-end test):

python -m pytest -q tests/test_extract.py   # extraction, dates, risk scoring
python tests/test_e2e.py                    # real MCP client over Streamable HTTP, calls every tool

Inspect with MCP Inspector

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector
# Transport: Streamable HTTP, URL: http://localhost:8000/mcp

Make it reachable by Alexa+ (public HTTPS)

Alexa+ needs a public HTTPS URL. The quickest way for a demo is a tunnel:

cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:8000      # or: ngrok http 8000
# then restart the server allowing that hostname (DNS-rebinding protection is on by default):
OBLIGATE_ALLOWED_HOSTS=your-subdomain.trycloudflare.com python -m obligate.server

Register https://<your-host>/mcp as the server URL in the Alexa+ developer tooling.

For something that stays up, the included Dockerfile runs on AWS App Runner or ECS Fargate:

docker build -t obligate . && docker run -p 8000:8000 -e OBLIGATE_ALLOWED_HOSTS=<your-domain> obligate

Amazon Bedrock extraction

The rules engine handles clear speech well ("I'll…", "X, can you…", "X will…", "we need to…"). For real-world transcripts with crosstalk, turn on Bedrock:

export OBLIGATE_LLM=bedrock
export AWS_REGION=us-east-1
export OBLIGATE_BEDROCK_MODEL=us.amazon.nova-lite-v1:0   # any Converse-compatible model
python -m obligate.server

Obligate calls the Bedrock Converse API with a structured-extraction prompt, resolves relative dates against the meeting date, and then runs the same risk scorer. If Bedrock errors or isn't configured, it falls back to the rules engine, so a meeting is never lost. See obligate/extract.py.

Configuration

Project layout

obligate/
  server.py      MCP server: tools, resource, routes, Streamable HTTP app
  extract.py     commitment extraction (rules + Amazon Bedrock)
  dates.py       "by Friday", "next week", "end of month" → dates
  risk.py        risk scoring + compliance tagging
  store.py       SQLite persistence
  dashboard.py   live dashboard
  static/voice.html  Alexa+ voice simulation
examples/        sample meeting transcript
tests/           unit tests + end-to-end MCP client test

What's next

• Speaker diarization straight from Alexa+ meeting audio

• Proactive Alexa+ notifications the morning an obligation is due

• Calendar, Jira and Slack sync so obligations land where teams already work

• DynamoDB + per-team auth for multi-tenant deployment

License

MIT. See LICENSE.