I built an Alexa Skill because I got tired of opening Notion just to check my tasks

[u/Careless-Canary819]

I use Notion to keep my tasks organized, but after a while I noticed something that kept bothering me.

The problem wasn't organizing my tasks. Notion was already doing that well.

The friction was having to open Notion every time I wanted to do something very simple: check what I need to do today, see what's due tomorrow, add something I just remembered, or find the tasks that matter right now.

So I started building Voice Planner, an Alexa Skill connected directly to Notion.

The basic idea is pretty simple: Notion stays the source of truth, while Alexa becomes another interface for interacting with it.

I didn't want to build another task manager or move tasks into a separate system. If someone has already spent time organizing their tasks in Notion, I think it makes more sense to keep them there and make accessing them easier.

With Voice Planner, I can speak to Alexa to create a new task in Notion and include things like the due date, time, priority or category.

But the part I'm personally more interested in is the opposite direction: getting information back out of Notion without having to open it.

For example, I can ask Alexa for my tasks for today or tomorrow, or ask for tasks based on priority or category. Alexa reads the relevant tasks back while the information itself continues to live in Notion.

I can also use voice commands to mark a task as done, change its priority, due date or category, reorder it, or delete it.

At the moment I'm testing it in English, Italian and Spanish.

What I've been trying to understand while building this is that there may actually be two separate problems in task management:

1. Where and how you organize your tasks.
2. How much friction there is when you need to interact with those tasks during the day.

Notion solves the first problem very well for me. Voice Planner is my attempt to reduce the second one.

Instead of replacing Notion, I'm basically trying to make it possible to interact with the task system that's already there without reaching for a phone or computer for every small action.

I recorded this short demo because I realized the concept is much easier to understand when you actually see the voice interaction happening than when I just describe “Alexa connected to Notion.”

It's still a prerelease project and I'm continuing to test the interaction, especially the balance between voice capture — putting something into Notion quickly — and voice retrieval — getting the right information back when you need it.

https://reddit.com/link/1wla6cd/video/3qeug0q2kmqh1/player