Talk to your Mac.
It does the thing.

OrbitAI sits in the menu bar and waits for its name. Say “hey Orbit, text Mum I’m running late” and it writes the message, reads it back to you, and sends it when you say yes. It knows your calendar, your reminders, your mail and your messages, because they are already on this Mac — and it never copies any of them anywhere else.

Install it See what it understands
Free and open source. Mac only, for now. One line to install, and no terminal after that.

What it is like

It starts the day for you

The first time you open your Mac each morning it says good morning by name and tells you what is coming: reminders due, what is on the calendar, who has messaged, what came in overnight. Then it goes quiet.

You talk to it normally

Say its name once and keep going. It follows what you meant, remembers who you were just talking about, answers in a sentence rather than a paragraph, and stops mid-word if you interrupt.

It asks before anything it cannot undo

Turning on dark mode just happens. Sending a message, placing a call, quitting something with unsaved work — it reads back exactly what it is about to do and waits for you to say yes.

It knows who is talking

Record your voice once and it greets you by name. Record the people you live with and it knows them too. You decide whether a voice it does not recognise gets an answer or gets turned away.

Sounds like this

Welcome back, Arjun. Good morning, sir. It’s eight forty-two in the morning, Monday the first of September. Three reminders due today, one overdue. Two events on the calendar. Top of the list: call the bank. That one is overdue. Standing by.

Times, dates and counts are spelled out as words before they reach the voice. Every speech engine mangles raw digits, each in its own way, and “8:42” read aloud badly is the difference between a colleague and a robot.

Where your things go

Nowhere, mostly

Your calendar, reminders, mail and messages are read on this Mac and stay on it. There is no OrbitAI account, no server of ours, and nothing to sign up for.

Recordings stay put

Telling voices apart happens on the machine. A few seconds of audio sits in a folder only you can read, and is overwritten by the next thing you say.

What does leave

Understanding an unusual sentence sends that sentence — not your files — to whichever model you chose. You can pick one that runs on the Mac instead, or none at all. The whole story.

What you need

A Mac running a recent macOS, and a couple of minutes to say yes to the permissions it asks for. That is the whole requirement.

Optional: an ElevenLabs key if you want a better voice than the built-in one, and Claude on the Mac if you want it to answer questions and do real work in your projects.

Being honest about the rough edges: installing it means pasting one line into Terminal, because there is no signed installer yet. The first briefing needs you to click through half a dozen macOS permission prompts. Reading your messages needs a permission macOS will not offer on its own, and everything else works without it. And a made-up wake word is harder for any recogniser to hear than two ordinary words.

Once it is on

Settings and Setup

The Orbit menu opens this site from your own Mac, wired to it. Every setting, the voice, the people it knows — all of it is a page, not a command.

Commands

What it understands out of the box, and how to phrase things it does not.

Macros

One phrase that does five things: “good night” can lock up, dim the screen and set an alarm.

Install it