Goldee: The AI Personal Assistant for Busy Families

Goldee has been co-designed with busy parents from day one and is deliberately crafted to bring a sense of familiarity and calm to frazzled parents whose emotions are at an all-time high.

A pilot involved a prototype and collaboration with 10 parents to validate hypotheses on their challenges and needs. Shadowboxer staff simulated the yet-to-be-developed custom AI to decipher and organise troves of school communications that parents needed help sorting.

This simulation saved Goldee AI from investing in costly and complex-to-build tech before it was proven the best solution. The product idea was validated: parents loved it, going so far as to say “Can this keep going? I never want it to end!”.

The Shadowboxer and Goldee team had the evidence (and confidence) to go ahead and invest in building the product and the bespoke AI model. In February 2024, the Goldee MVP was created and launched in beta, initially to 20 users. Since then, Goldee’s users have grown by over 2000% – all through word of mouth.

Goldee’s beta process allowed us to test and learn as each cohort was let in, and iterate as we scaled. In-depth user feedback was gathered through interviews and an easy in-app reporting feature. A healthy backlog of future-release features was prioritised based on needs and value to the end user. Now, with customer research in hand, the team has a revised roadmap for Goldee 2.0 which is set to include further improvements in the AI model and some exciting new features that tap into the ’I’m a parent on the go with my hands full’ experience.

With current users converting to paid subscriptions at a rate of 40%, and with 1.6M families in Australia – and readily designed for global scale – the business (and social cause) case for Goldee is looking sunny and sustainable.

Goldee has been designed for function, ease (purposely designed for parents with their hands full!), a boredom-busting, joy-sparking visual identity, and with safety and security as a top priority.

Goldee takes care of all the tedious tasks to even out the mental load and gift parents more precious moments with their families. Here’s how:

Reads your family comms so you don’t have to:
Goldee’s custom-created AI scans family-related emails, screenshots, and photos to find events, tasks and reminders that are relevant to each family’s situation.

Automatically keeps your calendar up to date:
Parents choose what they want Goldee to do and it will automatically schedule and remind you about events.

Daily briefings so parents never miss a beat (or a birthday party):
Goldee sends parents a daily notification with what’s on, plus alerts parents to any new updates that Goldee can tackle for you.

Parents approve plans in seconds:
Parents approve retrieved events, tasks and reminders so they’re in control of their schedule.

Share the load:
Goldee lets parents assign events to other family members to spread the effort.

Parents stay in control:
Parents choose what they want to share with Goldee and know it’s safe with the same data protection that banks use.

A joyful brand and product experience:
Designed for weary parents, Goldee has a deliberately cheery and blissful aesthetic, injecting a good dose of calm, joy, and ease into parents’ lives.

Goldee demonstrates how people’s lives can be positively impacted when technology and design excellence intermingle.

Outsourcing the scheduling of your family’s events to AI? Just 12 months ago this proposition would’ve sounded like science fiction. But two parents’ mission to create Australia’s first AI assistant for busy families has made it a reality in 2024.

Goldee is one of the only AI-parenting tools that reduces the time parents spend conversing with AI. Rather than a chat-style interface requiring extensive input from a parent, the Shadowboxer team tested thousands of real-life examples from different families to craft AI prompts. The result is that parents can throw almost anything Goldee’s way and then forget about it while Goldee does all the work talking to AI models. This makes Goldee one of the easiest AI-based apps to submit complex information to and aligns with its mission of reducing the mental load.

On the technical side, Goldee uses best-of-breed large language models (LLMs). Huge context windows allow long and complex information to be considered as a whole – crucial for understanding long school-year schedules and table data. Deep reasoning abilities coupled with advanced vector storage and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques allow Goldee to learn quickly about each family and what is most relevant to them.

Goldee can discern between family members, friends, teachers, and more and even pick up on things that change over time. Children progressing through grades or developing new interests and hobbies? Goldee picks up these changes to further reduce the load on weary and time-poor parents. Importantly, parents have final approval on everything, giving them confidence and control.

Goldee is creating lasting behaviour change by freeing parents, particularly mothers, of the mental load – also known as the ‘invisible workload’. The gender pay gap is a persistent and complex problem that costs the Australian economy $51.8 billion every year. Removing a portion of the 20-35 hours of unpaid work that women typically do has long-lasting positive impacts not only for women, but for men, children, and workplaces, too.

Goldee is helping close the gender pay gap, create a more equal society, and reduce parental burnout and anxiety. An exemplar of harnassing AI for good, Goldee sets the precedent for taking tech tools typically reserved for corporate settings, and applying them in new settings – in this instance, the domestic environment.

Goldee shows us how consciously, independently-created AI tools have the power to enable us to live richer and more balanced lives and inspires more diverse creators to invest in developing their own AI products. This movement helps to ensure the balance of tech-related power is spread to the hands of many and course-corrects the current biases in the field.