Setup

One line to install it. After that everything on this page is a button, including the things that used to want a terminal.

1. Put it on your Mac

Paste that into Terminal — Spotlight, type Terminal, press return — and press return again. It fetches Orbit, builds the menu bar app, and starts it. That is the only line there is; after it, the Orbit icon appears in your menu bar and Settings and Setup in its menu opens this page, served from your own Mac.
If it stops and asks for swiftc, run xcode-select --install, let Apple's download finish, and paste the line again. Without it there is no app, and with no app macOS never asks for the permissions below.

2. Let it see what it needs to

It will ask you

Microphone and Speech Recognition, for the wake word. Reminders, Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Messages and Notes, for reading them and acting on them. Accessibility, for typing and moving windows. Say yes as they come up.

It cannot ask you

Reading your messages needs Full Disk Access, and macOS never offers that by itself. Open System Settings, Privacy & Security, Full Disk Access, and add ~/Applications/DailyWelcome.app. Skip it and everything else still works; you just get no messages in the briefing.


  
A permission belongs to whichever app asked for it, so
  allowing your terminal does not allow the menu bar app — and a refusal
  is remembered, which is what the middle button undoes.






  
3. How it understands you

  

  

    

      
      
      
      
    

    
Claude is the default and needs no key of its own if you
    already have Claude on this Mac. The alternatives are OpenAI-shaped services
    — Groq and Google both have free tiers — and rules needs
    nothing at all, understanding the phrasings in the Commands list and no
    others. The key is kept in your login Keychain and is never typed as part of
    a command, because commands are remembered by the shell.

    

  






  
4. Can it find Claude?

  

    

      
      
    

    

      
      
    

    
The commonest complaint about Orbit is that it says Claude
    is not installed when it plainly is. The menu bar app is started by macOS
    rather than by your shell, so it never sees the directories your shell adds
    — and version managers like nvm put Claude somewhere with the version
    number in the middle of the path. This looks in all of them and remembers
    where it found it.

    

  






  
5. When the wake word doesn't fire

  

  

    

      
    

    

    
An invented name is in no recogniser's vocabulary, so it
    comes back as whatever real words it sounded like. Press the button, find
    what it heard instead, and paste that into the second box above — or
    change the wake word to two ordinary words, which works better than any
    amount of tuning.

  






  
6. A better voice, if you want one

  

    

      
      
    

    
Out of the box it uses the voice your Mac already has,
    which is free, instant and stays on the machine. Piper is a better one that
    also stays on the machine, at the cost of a download. ElevenLabs is better
    still and needs a key and an internet connection — that one lives on
    the Voice page.

    

  






  
Putting this page on the web

  


cd macos-daily-welcome/web/orbitai
vercel deploy --prod

orbit console --allow https://your-project.vercel.app
orbit console --bridge                # prints the pairing token

    
You do not need this. The Orbit menu, Settings and
    Setup, opens the same page from your own Mac with nothing to pair. This
    is for reaching it from a deployed copy instead, and then the bridge refuses
    anything that does not carry the token — a browser will let any site
    talk to localhost, and this one can send mail. Safari blocks HTTPS pages from
    reaching local addresses at all, so there, use the menu.