Meet Vellum
Your personal AI assistant. For real this time.
Not another chatbot in a browser tab. Vellum is a personal AI assistant that lives on your machine, has its own identity, and actually does things in the world. It can have its own email, its own accounts, its own presence — set up in minutes, not hours. It works for you, but it isn't you.
And the best part? Getting started feels like magic, not homework.
Built on four principles.
Everything we build, every feature we ship, every word on this page comes back to these four ideas.
AI shouldn't feel like work. Setting up your assistant should feel like meeting someone new, not filling out a form.
Simple by design. We don't dump every feature on you at once. Vellum reveals capabilities as they become relevant. You won't see a permissions screen before you've even said hello. You won't configure OAuth scopes before you've sent your first email. Things show up when they matter, not before.
Fun on purpose. There's delight baked into this. Watching your assistant come to life, picking its name, shaping its personality, seeing it build you an app out of thin air. This is supposed to be exciting. If it ever feels like a chore, we've failed.
So what can it actually do?
Here's a taste. Not the full list. The "wait, seriously?" list.
| You say... | It does... |
|---|---|
| Start my day | Pulls your weather, calendar, and news into a personalized morning briefing |
| Build me a habit tracker | Builds a fully interactive web app, right there in the conversation. Not a mockup — a real, working app. |
| Check my email | Connects to your inbox (or its own), reads, triages, and summarizes your messages. Can draft replies too. |
| Call the dentist and reschedule | Makes an actual phone call, on your behalf, with its own voice. Yes, really. |
| Post in #general that deploy is done | Sends a Slack message to your workspace. Reads channels, replies to threads, keeps you in the loop. |
| Write a blog post about sourdough | Opens a document editor, researches the topic, and drafts a full post you can edit and publish. |
| Remember that I hate cilantro | Saves it to memory. Remembers it next week, next month, forever. Across every conversation. |
| Order me a coffee | Opens DoorDash, finds the nearest spot, walks you through the order. Remembers your usual. |
| Some skills require one-time setup. Your assistant walks you through it. | |
And when it doesn't know how to do something? It figures it out. You can install new skills from a growing library, build your own, or just ask — and watch it find a way. The more you use it, the more it can do.
Get started in 5 minutes.
No account needed. No credit card. No 47-step setup wizard.
- Download Vellum for macOS. Download link.
- Open it. Your assistant wakes up and introduces itself.
- Have a conversation. Name it, shape its personality, tell it about yourself. Or don't. It'll figure you out eventually.
- Do something useful. Check the weather. Build an app. Set a reminder. Read your files. Once you're ready, connect your email, order food, and more.
That's it. No onboarding marathon. No required setup. Just start talking.
A note about trust. (Because we promised transparency.)
Vellum runs locally on your machine. That means your assistant can access your files, your tools, your services. That's what makes it powerful. It's also what makes it worth understanding.
- Every sensitive action asks permission. File access, shell commands, anything that touches your system shows an Allow / Don't Allow prompt. You can approve once, for a session, or set standing permissions. You're always in control.
- Your data stays on your machine. Your workspace, memories, and config are local files. We don't sync them to a cloud.
- Your prompts reach an AI model. Your assistant thinks by talking to a cloud AI provider. Your messages and context are sent to generate responses. This is the trade-off, and we want you to know about it, not discover it later.
- You can always say no. To any permission, any time. It won't retry without asking, won't find a workaround, won't guilt-trip you. No means no.
We have a whole section dedicated to this. You should read it.
Explore the docs.
These docs were written by a personal AI assistant about itself. Which is either the most efficient way to write product docs, or the beginning of a very specific sci-fi movie. 😏