What is Vellum?
The short version
Vellum is a personal AI assistant that lives on your computer. It has its own identity, its own email, its own accounts. It can read your files, manage your calendar, order you food, build you an app, control your computer, take calls on your behalf, and remember that you take your coffee black.
It's not a chatbot. It's not an autocomplete engine. It's a separate entity that works for you, learns about you, and takes real actions in the real world.
How is this different from ChatGPT / Claude / etc.?
Those are conversation tools. You type, they respond, you copy-paste the answer somewhere useful. The conversation ends and everything resets.
Vellum is different in a few important ways:
It has tools, not just words. Your assistant can browse the web, read your files, run code, send emails, manage your calendar, and interact with dozens of services. It can also see your screen and control your Mac directly — clicking, typing, and navigating apps on your behalf through macOS accessibility APIs. Sensitive actions always require your approval first. It doesn't describe what you could do. It does it.
It remembers you. Not just within a single conversation. Across days, weeks, months. Your preferences, your projects, your quirks. It builds a picture of who you are and uses that to help you better over time.
It has its own identity. Your assistant isn't borrowing your email or your GitHub account. It has its own. Your assistant gets its own email address out of the box. When it sends an email on your behalf, the recipient knows they're talking to your assistant, not to you. Clear boundaries, no confusion.
It lives on your machine. Your workspace, your memories, your configuration... all stored locally as plain text files you can read and edit. No mysterious cloud database. No data you can't access. It's yours.
It's personal. Not a team tool. Not a shared resource. Not a Slack bot everyone in your company uses. It's your assistant, personalized to you, and nobody else can access it.
What can it do?
A non-exhaustive list of things your assistant can handle, organized by category:
💬 Communication
- Gmail — Manage your inbox, draft replies, archive, label, and unsubscribe
- Agent Mail — Send and receive email from your assistant's own email address
- Messaging — Read, search, and send messages across Gmail, Telegram, and other platforms
- Phone Calls — Make and receive phone calls via Twilio
- Slack — Read, send, and manage Slack messages
- Contacts — Manage contacts, communication channels, and access control
- Notifications — Send notifications through the unified notification router
- Email Sequences — Create and manage automated email drip sequences
📅 Productivity
- Google Calendar — Check schedules, create events, and coordinate availability
- Tasks — Two-layer task system with reusable templates and a prioritized work queue
- Schedule — Recurring and one-shot scheduling with cron, RRULE, or single fire-at time
- Followups — Track sent messages awaiting responses across channels
- Playbooks — Trigger-action automation rules for handling incoming messages
- Document — Write and edit long-form content like blog posts, articles, and reports
- Start the Day — Get a personalized daily briefing with weather, news, and actionable insights
🖥️ Automation & Control
- Computer Use — Control your Mac directly — clicking, typing, and navigating apps via macOS accessibility APIs
- Browser — Navigate and interact with web pages using a headless browser
- Screen Watch — Observe the screen at regular intervals with OCR
- Watcher — Poll and monitor external sources for changes
- Heartbeat — Configure periodic background checklists and health checks
- Subagent — Spawn autonomous background agents for parallel work
🛠️ Development
- App Builder — Build interactive apps, dashboards, tools, and data visualizations
- Frontend Design — Create distinctive, production-grade frontend interfaces with high design quality
- ACP — Delegate coding tasks to external coding agents via the Agent Client Protocol
🎨 Media
- Image Studio — Generate and edit images using AI
- Media Processing — Ingest and process video, audio, and image files
- Transcribe — Turn audio and video into text with Whisper
🛍️ Services
- Amazon — Shop on Amazon and Amazon Fresh
- DoorDash — Order food, groceries, and convenience items
- Restaurant Reservations — Book reservations on OpenTable or Resy
- Weather — Get current conditions and forecasts for any location
🧠 Knowledge & Identity
- Memory — Remembers your preferences, projects, and context across conversations
- SOUL.md / IDENTITY.md / USER.md — Editable files that shape your assistant's personality and knowledge of you
- Skills Catalog — Discover bundled skills and install community skills
- Skill Management — Create and manage custom skills as your needs evolve
🔗 Integrations
- OAuth Integrations — Connect to third-party services like GitHub, Notion, Linear, Airtable, Spotify, and more
- MCP Servers — Add Model Context Protocol servers for extended tool access
- ChatGPT Import — Import conversation history from ChatGPT
- Voice Input — Hold Fn to talk to your assistant
And if it can't do something? You can teach it. Skills are modular and extensible. More on that in Your First Skill.
Where does it run?
🖥️ macOS
Vellum is a native macOS app with a menu bar presence. Chat with your assistant in the full desktop app, use voice input, and let it control your computer — clicking, typing, and navigating apps on your behalf. It supports macOS 15 (Sequoia) and above.
- One-click DMG install
- Desktop automation via macOS accessibility APIs
- Voice input with hold-to-talk (Fn key)
- Local workspace with plain-text config files you own
📡 Channels
Beyond the desktop app, you can reach your assistant through external channels — so it's available wherever you are, not just when you're at your Mac.
- Telegram — Chat with your assistant from any device via a Telegram bot
- Slack — Message your assistant directly in Slack, useful for work contexts
- Phone — Call your assistant or have it take calls on your behalf via Twilio
How does it work? (The 30-second version)
- You talk to it. Through the desktop app, voice chat, or (eventually) other channels.
- It thinks. Your message, along with relevant context (your preferences, memories, workspace files), is sent to a cloud AI model to generate a response.
- It acts. If the response involves doing something (reading a file, sending an email, building an app, or controlling your desktop), your assistant uses its tools to make it happen. For desktop actions, it sees your screen, plans the steps, and executes them automatically. But it won't go rogue — your assistant always asks for permission before taking sensitive actions like sending emails, making purchases, or accessing new services. You stay in control, and you can configure exactly what requires approval and what your assistant can handle on its own.
- It learns. Important facts, preferences, and context are saved to your local workspace so it gets better over time.
Transparency moment: Your assistant runs locally, but it thinks in the cloud. Your prompts and context are sent to an AI model provider (like Anthropic) to generate responses. This is the trade-off of having a smart local assistant. We'd rather tell you upfront than have you discover it in a footnote.
Is it safe?
Vellum has a built-in trust system. Sensitive actions — sending emails, making purchases, controlling your desktop — require your explicit approval. You can configure trust rules per channel, and credentials are stored in your macOS Keychain, never in plain text.
Learn more in Trust & Security.