How ORBIS works

ORBIS is a voice-first AI companion that runs entirely on your own Apple-Silicon Mac. This page is the mental model — the moving parts and how they fit together. It's the why and the shape; the exact knobs live in Reference, and the step-by-step lives in How-to.

The three pieces

ORBIS is one app made of three cooperating layers:

The orb (the window you see). A native macOS shell rendering the live orb — the visual you talk to. It reflects state: idle, listening, thinking, speaking. It's a thin presentation layer; the thinking and the hearing happen below it.
The sidecar (the brain). A local process that runs the voice pipeline and the agent: speech-to-text, the language model that routes and responds, the tools it can call, the delegates it can hand work to, and your memory. It runs on 127.0.0.1 — nothing leaves your machine unless you configure a remote model or delegate.
The native audio engine. Captures your microphone and plays the orb's voice with low latency, handling echo cancellation so the orb doesn't hear itself. Audio is native (not browser) — that's a core reason ORBIS is Apple-Silicon-only.

What happens when you talk

A turn flows top to bottom and back:

 you speak ──▶ mic ──▶ speech-to-text ──▶ the model
                                            │
                          ┌─────────────────┤ decides: answer, or use a tool /
                          │                 │ delegate, or schedule a reminder
                          ▼                 ▼
                    tools & delegates   reply text ──▶ text-to-speech ──▶ orb speaks

The model is a router first: it decides whether to just answer, call a tool (like setting a reminder), or hand a heavier task to one of your configured agents (a delegate) and narrate the result when it comes back.

Single-owner, on your hardware

ORBIS is built for one owner — you. It runs locally, keeps your memory locally, and only reaches the network for the models and delegates you point it at. There's no multi-tenant cloud in the middle. See the privacy model (coming to this section) for the full picture.

Always available

ORBIS lives in your menu bar, not the dock. Closing the window hides it; the sidecar and audio engine keep running, so it keeps listening in the background. Bring it back from the menu-bar icon. (See the menu-bar how-to.)

Where to go next

Do something: How-to guides.
Look something up: Reference.
Just try it: Getting started.

How ORBIS works ​

The three pieces ​

What happens when you talk ​

Single-owner, on your hardware ​

Always available ​