LifeLens AI – Ghost in the Machine 👻
An AI That Remembers What You Thought You'd Lost
What if your memories didn't disappear… but simply waited for you to ask about them?
That's the idea behind LifeLens AI, my personal AI memory assistant built for the Hacktoberfest 2026 Week 4 challenge: Ghost in the Machine.
Instead of creating a traditional chatbot that forgets everything after a conversation, I wanted to build something that could help preserve personal experiences and bring them back when needed.
🧠 What I Built
LifeLens AI is a personal memory assistant powered by Gemma.
The idea is simple: save an experience, let AI analyze it, and retrieve it later using natural language.
For example, imagine uploading a fee receipt today. A few weeks later, instead of searching through hundreds of photos, you can simply ask:
"What do you know about my Nebula Fee Receipt?"
LifeLens searches saved experiences, retrieves relevant information, and provides an answer with references to the original memory.
Current features:
- AI-powered conversations using Gemma.
- Persistent conversation history.
- Save and manage personal memories.
- Upload photos, receipts, and other experiences.
- Search saved experiences using natural language.
- AI-powered experience analysis.
- Return references to the memories used in an answer.
👻 The Ghost in the Machine Moment
One of my favourite tests was uploading a receipt titled Nebula Fee Receipt.
Later, I asked LifeLens:
"What do you know about my Nebula Fee Receipt? Tell me its amount, recipient, and transaction date."
LifeLens retrieved the saved experience and returned:
- Amount: ₹600
- Recipient: Yash Umakant Gavali
- Transaction date: 26 September 2026, 1:04 PM
It also returned the reference to the original saved experience.
That was the moment the idea started feeling real. I wasn't just asking an AI a general question. I was asking it about something from my own stored experiences.
🛠️ How I Built It
I used technologies I was already working with:
- Python – Backend development
- FastAPI – REST API
- PostgreSQL – Persistent data storage
- SQLAlchemy – Database operations
- Gemma – AI-powered responses
- Pydantic – Request and response validation
The basic workflow looks like this:
- Upload an experience such as a photo or receipt.
- Store its details in the database.
- Analyze the experience using AI.
- Search saved experiences when a user asks a question.
- Pass relevant memory context to Gemma.
- Return the response along with references to the retrieved experiences.
The backend exposes these capabilities through API endpoints, which I tested using FastAPI's Swagger documentation.
🔓 Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
For a personal memory assistant, the AI model matters because it is handling information that can be meaningful and private.
Using Gemma gives the project an open-weight model foundation. It also gives me more flexibility to experiment with models, providers, and deployment approaches instead of building the entire experience around one proprietary model.
I'm currently using a hosted model API rather than running inference locally, so I am not claiming that the current version works offline.
For me, open innovation means having the freedom to understand, adapt, and extend the technology behind a project.
🔗 Demo & Source Code
GitHub Repository:
https://github.com/MUBARAK-53/Lifelens
Demo Video:
[ADD YOUR LIFELENS DEMO VIDEO LINK]
The current demonstration focuses on the backend APIs and the memory-retrieval workflow. A dedicated user-facing frontend is still part of the future development.
🧩 A Note About Development
This Week 4 submission builds on my earlier LifeLens backend work. I created a new public repository for this challenge and extended the project with its Gemma-powered memory retrieval workflow and source references in chat.
I wanted to be transparent about reusing and extending my existing work rather than presenting the entire codebase as newly written during this challenge week.
🌼 The Spirit of It
Halloween is usually about ghosts, but this project made me think about a different kind of ghost.
The little things we forget:
- A receipt from an important day.
- A photograph from a trip.
- A moment we thought we'd remember forever.
- A small experience that becomes meaningful later.
Maybe the most interesting thing an AI can do isn't just generate something new.
Maybe it's help us remember something old.
LifeLens AI — Your memories never disappear. They wait to be remembered. 👻
Built for: Hacktoberfest 2026 – Week 4: Ghost in the Machine
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