Skip to content

Example: Notification Triage

Stream notifications from the phone. Agent decides which are urgent, surfaces them.

What It Does

  1. Start a background logcat stream filtering for NotificationManagerService
  2. DevDuck's event bus receives every new notification
  3. Agent periodically (or ambient-mode) reviews buffered events
  4. For important ones → notify() to macOS / Telegram / speak
  5. Dismiss trivial ones

Setup

export DEVDUCK_TOOLS="strands_adb:adb;strands_tools:shell;devduck.tools:notify,telegram,ambient_mode,scheduler"
export DEVDUCK_AMBIENT_MODE=true
export TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=xxx

Start the Stream

# On first DevDuck prompt:
🦆 start logcat stream for notifications, filter NotificationManagerService

This calls under the hood:

adb(action="log_stream_start",
    filter="NotificationManagerService",
    topic="phone.notifications")

Ambient Triage

With DEVDUCK_AMBIENT_MODE=true, the agent wakes up every minute of idle:

# Prompt (set via system_prompt or initial query):
🦆 every time you wake, check the event bus for phone.notifications.
   for each notification:
     - if from Mom/Dad/Partner → notify me via Telegram + macOS
     - if from Slack or email → add to a daily digest
     - if spam (promo, system, ads) → ignore

graph LR
    LOG["📜 logcat"] -->|stream| ADB["strands_adb"]
    ADB -->|publish| BUS["🚌 event_bus<br/>phone.notifications"]
    BUS -->|inject context| AGENT["🤖 Ambient agent"]

    AGENT -->|urgent?| DECIDE{Classify}
    DECIDE -->|yes| NOTIFY["📱 notify()"]
    DECIDE -->|yes| TG["💬 telegram"]
    DECIDE -->|digest| DAILY["📝 append to digest"]
    DECIDE -->|spam| NOOP["🔇 ignore"]

    style AGENT fill:#3DDC84,color:#000

Morning Brief via scheduler

scheduler(action="add",
  name="morning-brief",
  schedule="0 8 * * *",
  prompt="""
  read phone.notifications events from the last 12 hours.
  write a morning brief: who tried to reach me, what was urgent,
  what's my todo list based on these messages.
  notify me via Telegram.
  """,
  tools="strands_adb.adb,devduck.tools.telegram,devduck.tools.notify")

One-Shot Variant (no streaming)

Don't want background streams? Just poll:

agent("""
dump current notifications via notifications_parsed.
surface anything from Mom/Dad/Partner that's unread.
""")

Dismissing

adb(action="dismiss_notifications")    # dismiss all
adb(action="key", key="KEYCODE_ESCAPE") # dismiss the shade

Full Example Script

# examples/notifications.py
from strands import Agent
from strands_adb import adb

agent = Agent(
    tools=[adb],
    system_prompt="""
You are a notification triage agent.
- Use notifications_parsed to see structured notifications.
- Classify: URGENT (family/partner), IMPORTANT (work), DIGEST, SPAM.
- For URGENT: return a clear summary.
- For SPAM: suggest dismiss.
""",
)

while True:
    result = agent("check current notifications, triage them")
    print(result)
    input("\nPress enter to check again...")

Privacy

Logcat exposes notification content including message previews. Treat accordingly:

  • Filter aggressively (NotificationManagerService only)
  • Redact sensitive fields before logging
  • Don't push raw notification content to third-party APIs without thinking

→ See Safety guide.

What's Next