Meet Billi, my voice-operated agent

Cara Katz · Published June 27, 2026

I built Billi, a voice agent that helps me cut through the mental load of running a household — appointments, reminders, the running list I never get to put down. Hands-free, out loud, and back to my day.

I left my first event with Willa feeling inspired. So, I jumped into Claude code, bolted on some ElevenLabs and a smidge of Twilio, a dash of Deepgram, and made myself a Billi.

Billi is a voice operated agent. I speak into the glowing orb and she reads my emails for me and auto-sorts them into to-dos, things to ask me about, or drafts replies not only to my emails BUT she also drafts WhatsApp messages so I can forward the email updates to my husband or be super annoying to my sisters by sending them emails they did not ask me to forward in a whole new way! It can also now forward my childcare schedule when there is a change to it via Whatsapp to the relevant caregivers.

She also reads (some) of my Slack workspaces (the ones without NDAs or privacy concerns) to let me know what I've missed or more accurately keep me from missing half the posts. She has a working memory as well to remember why I am in 132 Slack communities in the first place.

She even speaks English with a hypnotically calm voice of a yoga teacher right after they do the metal sound bath bowl at the end of class. And I gave her an ever so slight French accent because why not?

So far, the best part is she can also drop into voice imitations of Chilli and Bandit from Bluey which makes my child finally think what I do on the computer is cool.

For transparency: She runs very effectively on the lowest models (Haiku). She cost me $112 to build. She saved me an estimated 4 hours of just comms work (inboxes and slacks). I have no way of knowing her recurring overhead or energy consumption just yet but if anyone is interested I'm happy to report back as a conscious AI consumer!

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