Gianni-AI — Family Assistant
Family expenses, managed and categorized by AI: no more spreadsheets to update by hand at the end of every month.
Gianni-AI comes from a very domestic, very tedious problem: keeping track of where a family's money goes. Groceries, bills, Saturday's dinner out, the unexpected trip to the mechanic — dozens of small entries a month, and traditional spreadsheets work beautifully for exactly two weeks, until someone gets tired of updating them. The problem isn't the math, it's the categorizing: deciding, every single time, which box each expense goes in. And that is precisely the effort I wanted to take away from people and hand to the AI.
The gesture: write a sentence, don't fill in a table
In a classic budgeting app, for every expense you have to open a dropdown and pick a category, then another for the payment method, then type the amount in the right field. Gianni-AI flips the gesture: you write the expense the way you'd say it out loud — «55 euros of groceries at Coop», «electricity bill 78» — and the model extracts the amount, understands what it is and assigns it a consistent category. No menus, no required fields: one line of text, and the rest is automatic.
How it works underneath
The heart of the app is a PHP backend acting as a bridge to Gemini, Google's AI model, called via API. Every entry is sent to the model with a precise request: not «write something about this expense», but «return category, amount and type in a structured format». That is an important difference: asking for a structured answer rather than a discursive one is what lets you store the data cleanly and aggregate it. The answer comes back, is recorded, and the totals update on their own.
The delicate part of a system like this is consistency: if the same expense lands in «Groceries» today and «Shopping» tomorrow, the summaries become useless. That's why the model doesn't invent free categories on every pass but works over a defined set — groceries, bills, restaurant, transport, health, home, clothing, gifts, phone, and so on — alongside the income entries, like salary and other income. The AI interprets natural language; the category structure keeps it all in order.
What you see in the end
The result isn't yet another table to read, but a picture that builds itself: where the family budget really goes, month by month, category by category. The question the app answers is not «how much did I spend» — everyone knows that — but «what does it go on, without me having to file away every receipt». It's the difference between a ledger and an assistant: the first you have to keep yourself, the second works while you live.
Why «Gianni»
The playful name isn't a detail: it says exactly what the app wants to be. Not management software to learn, with its learning curve and its menus, but a member of the family you simply tell what you spent. «Gianni, I filled up the tank, 60 euros» — and Gianni takes care of it. The AI here isn't an extra feature: it's what makes the gesture simple enough to actually be done, every day, instead of being put off to the end of the month and then never.
Under the hood
Gianni-AI is PHP and an API integration with Gemini, no heavy frameworks. Since this is domestic, personal data, it's designed as a private family tool, not a public service: the entries stay in your own space, and the AI steps in only at the moment of categorizing, never to make decisions in anyone's place. It's one of several projects on the portal where AI isn't there to produce content to display, but to remove a chore — here, the most unwelcome one of running a household.