Orbie

TL;DR

Orbie is a small, living orb at the top of your Windows screen that works as a personal assistant. It helps with tasks, reminders, your calendar, email and files, talks with you by voice, and keeps your private life on your PC. I designed and built it on my own, from the animated interface to the signed installer and auto-updater. It's shipped, free to download, and on version 1.2.2.

The problem

To be useful, an assistant needs to see your email, calendar, notes, files, clipboard and sometimes your screen, and I didn't want any of that to leave the PC.

Orbie is built around one rule: private data never leaves the PC. All of it is handled by a local model: an AI model that runs on your own PC. Only general questions with nothing personal in them may go to the cloud, and anything that changes something waits for your click.

What I built

Assistant

• Chat with two brains: each message goes to a local model (anything personal or tool-using) or to Claude Code (Anthropic's AI coding assistant) on your own login, for harder general questions with web search only.
• Editable memory: Orbie remembers what you tell it about yourself, on the PC, and you can edit or delete any memory.

Everyday help

• Tasks, reminders and notes: captured from plain language ("remind me every Monday at 9…"). Reminders fire as Windows notifications even with the panel closed, and missed ones fire on start.
• Morning brief and nudges: a daily brief at 08:00 with events, tasks and important email, meeting heads-ups 10 minutes ahead, and quiet hours that hold nudges overnight.
• Google Calendar and Gmail: ask about your schedule, book events, summarise and reply to email. Every create, move, delete, send or archive shows an editable confirmation card first.

Voice

• Push-to-talk, spoken replies and a wake word: hold Ctrl+Alt+V to talk, hear replies in one of 28 English voices, or go hands-free with a wake word ("Hey Jarvis" by default, or your own). It all runs on the PC, offline once the models are downloaded.

On your PC

• Apps, files, clipboard and screen: opens apps and sites, finds files, tidies Downloads with a preview and undo, explains the clipboard, and answers questions about a screenshot with a local vision model. It stays in Documents, Desktop and Downloads unless you add folders, and never deletes anything.

Developer tools

• Claude Code island: running Claude Code sessions show up in a pill around the orb, where you can answer their permission requests and questions and approve their plans from the desktop.
• Hand Claude Code a coding task: confirm the folder and wording, then watch its steps stream into the Code tab, ending with a summary and the changed files.

Interface and distribution

• An orb with a personality: it breathes, blinks, follows your pointer with its eyes, sleeps after five quiet minutes, and has distinct looks for listening, thinking and speaking.
• Signed installer and self-update: a per-user installer with no admin prompt. Since 1.2.0, Orbie checks for updates in the background and installs one only when you choose Restart to update, and only if it's signed with my certificate.

How it works

Orbie first checks whether a request is personal, and that decides which brain may see it.

flowchart TB
    subgraph pc ["Your PC"]
        A(["You ask Orbie"])
        B{"Anything personal?"}
        C["Local model on your PC"]
        E["Your tasks, calendar, email, files"]
        F{"Changes something?"}
        G["Your approval"]
        H(["Done, orb reacts"])
        I(["Answer shown"])
    end
    subgraph cloud ["Cloud"]
        D["Claude Code, web only"]
    end
    A e1@-->|"click, shortcut or voice"| B
    B e2@-->|"yes, or needs a tool"| C
    B -->|"no, general question"| D
    C e3@--> E
    E e4@--> F
    F e5@-->|"yes"| G
    G e6@-->|"approved"| H
    F -->|"no"| H
    D --> I
    e1@{ animate: true }
    e2@{ animate: true }
    e3@{ animate: true }
    e4@{ animate: true }
    e5@{ animate: true }
    e6@{ animate: true }
    %% walkthrough "Move my 3 pm meeting to 4": A > B > C > E > F > G > H
    %% walkthrough "Summarise my unread email": A > B > C > E > F > H
    %% walkthrough "What's new in Next.js 16?": A > B > D > I

Orbie is an Electron desktop app (a way to build Windows apps with web technology) with a React and Ant Design interface. LM Studio serves the local model, and the Claude Code command-line tool is the cloud brain. Voice runs on the PC too (Whisper for speech recognition, Kokoro for the spoken voice, openWakeWord for the wake word and Silero to tell when you're speaking), and your data stays on the PC, with secrets encrypted by Windows.

Key decisions & trade-offs

• Route by privacy, not by capability: personal data only ever reaches the local model, and the cloud gets general questions only. The cost is that you need LM Studio and a roughly 12 GB model, and a GPU for fast answers.
• Lock a chat to local once it touches personal data: after that, even typing /cloud (the command that forces the cloud brain) keeps it local. That stops personal context leaking into later cloud messages, at the cost of starting a New chat whenever you want the cloud again.
• Treat other people's text as data, never instructions: email, invites, files and clipboard content can't tell Orbie what to do, and after reading them, saving a memory or opening a site asks first. This guards against prompt injection (hidden instructions planted in content) at the cost of extra confirmations.
• Use Claude Code on your existing login, with no key to manage: the cloud brain gets web search only, with no files, tools or personal setup, so it can't touch your PC. The trade-off is depending on Claude Code's behaviour: when Claude Code 2.1.296 changed how it lists its built-in plugins, I shipped Orbie 1.2.1 to keep cloud questions working while still blocking other plugins.
• Sign it myself: a self-signed certificate lets Orbie check that every update comes from me, without paying for a commercial certificate. The cost is that users trust the certificate once per PC, and Windows SmartScreen still warns.

Results & status

• Shipped: five versions (1.0.0, 1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.2.1 and 1.2.2), the last three published as GitHub Releases with the installer, update manifest and my certificate.
• Light on the PC: a download of about 150 MB; about 0.3% CPU while awake, about 0% asleep, and about 175 MB of memory, measured on the installed app on a 16-thread Windows 11 PC.
• Private by default: no telemetry or crash reporting.

You can download Orbie from its releases page.

What this shows

• End-to-end ownership: from the animated UI and model routing to the signed per-user installer, the auto-updater and user docs.
• Privacy and security for AI apps: privacy-based routing, a chat-level local lock, the "untrusted text is data" rule, confirmation cards and Windows-encrypted secrets.
• Local AI integration: local language and vision models, on-device speech recognition, text-to-speech and wake-word detection.
• Third-party integration: Gmail and Calendar with only five Google permissions, plus an opt-in Claude Code link that shows and backs up its settings change.
• Release engineering: code signing, an update manifest per release, and in-place updates that keep the user's data.