Orbit on your iPhone

Two things, and you probably want both. An Orbit icon on your home screen that talks to your Mac, and “Hey Siri, ask Orbit” for when your hands are busy. Neither needs the App Store, and nothing here costs anything.

Being straight about the shape of it: the assistant is the Mac. Your phone is a way to reach it, so the Mac has to be awake and on the same Wi-Fi. An iPhone will not let any app but Siri listen for a wake word in the background, which is why the hands-free half of this goes through Siri rather than around it.

1. On the Mac, open it up for one session

orbit console --phone

It prints the address to type on the phone and a six-digit code, and it stays running until you press ctrl-C. Only then is Orbit reachable from the Wi-Fi — it is not a setting, because something that can send mail and place calls should be on the network because you decided so just now, not because a file said so eight months ago.

2. On the phone, open it and sign in

Type the address

The one the Mac printed — usually your Mac’s name followed by .local:7717/phone. Safari, not Chrome, if you want the home screen part to work properly.

Then the code

Six digits, from the Mac’s screen. It works once and expires after ten minutes, so somebody reading it over your shoulder afterwards has nothing. The phone remembers the real key and never shows it.

Then Share → Add to Home Screen. It gets an icon, opens without Safari’s address bar, and behaves like an app, because at that point it is one. Signing in again later is only needed if you sign out or clear Safari’s data.

3. Hey Siri, ask Orbit

This is the hands-free half. Open Shortcuts on the iPhone, make a new shortcut with four actions, and name it Ask Orbit — the name is what you say to Siri, so name it something you can say.

1. Dictate Text

Leave it as it is. This is what turns what you said into words.

2. Get Contents of URL

The address the Mac printed, with /api/ask on the end. Method POST. One header: X-Orbit-Token, set to the key from the button below. Request body JSON, one field called text, set to the Dictated Text.

3. Get Dictionary Value

Key speak. That is the sentence Orbit wants to say back.

4. Speak Text

Fed with that value. Now your phone says the answer out loud, in Siri’s voice, while the Mac does the thing in yours.

Say “Hey Siri, Ask Orbit” and it will ask what you want. Anything Orbit would want a spoken yes for comes back as a question rather than being done — say it again as a plain instruction from the app if you meant it.

When you are not at home

The honest answer

Out of the house, none of this reaches your Mac, and that is on purpose: the alternative is a hole in your router pointed at a program that can read your mail.

If you want it anyway

Install Tailscale on the Mac and the phone and sign both into the same account. The Mac then has an address that works from anywhere, over an encrypted link, with nothing exposed to the internet. Use that address instead of the .local one.

An Android phone, or an iPad

The same page works on both. On Android, Chrome offers Install app instead of Add to Home Screen, and the Siri part has an equivalent in Google Assistant routines pointed at the same address. An iPad is an iPhone here in every way that matters.