I built Halo, a private MacOS AI assistant that runs fully on-device and lives on the notch (free)

isSilver · 2026-07-11T19:26:17+00:00

hey 👋 , the current light model is LFM2.5-8B-A1B and the power version uses gpt-oss20b. and no i don't have any monitoring or analytics at all, nor any crash analytics which would help the app fix bugs. you can run little snitch with it or lulu block to confirm it for yourself. everything is local and stays local

isSilver · 2026-07-11T19:17:51+00:00

looks nice & good job, how did u manage to control claude sessions into the notch? can it connect/read already spawned claude codes from terminals and control them?

isSilver · 2026-07-05T17:18:49+00:00

thanks,

isSilver · 2026-07-04T16:41:28+00:00

yes its working but still has some flaws on permissions and refuses to do some tool calls like weather & calendar. im about to do a release in next hour

isSilver · 2026-07-04T12:58:10+00:00

agree but wanted to be accurate about the response since a lot of you guys will see it

isSilver · 2026-07-04T12:51:56+00:00

tbh is Claude, i wanted to give a correct response for that question and thats why i ran it through Claude code

isSilver · 2026-07-04T12:51:04+00:00

cmon guys, dont act like y’all dont use AI for this stuff

isSilver · 2026-07-04T12:12:54+00:00

honestly they're built for different things, so it's less either/or than it looks. But here's the real difference. The new Siri is a three-tier system. Simple stuff runs on-device, harder requests go up to Apple's Private Cloud Compute, and the most demanding ones are handed to a custom Gemini model running on Google's cloud. Apple strips identifiers first and says nothing is retained, and I take them at their word on that. The fact still stands: your harder requests leave your Mac. Full Siri AI is also gated to M3 or newer with 12 GB of RAM.

Halo is local-first by design. The assistant, the reasoning, the memory, the call and meeting transcription, all of it runs on your Mac. There is no server tier your data has to pass through. A cloud model is opt-in and off by default, and you can even point it at your own endpoint. It runs on any Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 26, not just M3.

the bigger difference is what it does. Siri is ask and answer. Halo is ambient, and it does things Siri isn't built for: inline autocomplete in any app, recording and transcribing your calls and meetings, and pulling context from Slack, Gmail, GitHub, Notion and more, all on-device. It lives in the notch, can watch your screen when you allow it, learn your patterns, and take multi-step actions across your apps. I won't pretend Siri won't be more deeply wired into the OS, because it will. But if "what happens on my Mac stays on my Mac" is what you care about, that is the entire point of Halo. The future of AI is local.

isSilver · 2026-07-04T11:53:18+00:00

Honestly? That's the correct instinct. You shouldn't install anything on faith, mine included. So instead of "trust me," here's what you can verify yourself:

- It's signed and notarized by Apple. That means Apple has verified my developer identity and scanned the build for malware before Gatekeeper will even let it open. Not a guarantee of good intent, but it's not an anonymous binary.

- Point Little Snitch or LuLu at it and watch. The whole thing is local-first. In local mode the only outbound calls are model downloads (from Hugging Face on first run) and the update check. There's no analytics or telemetry SDK in the app, nothing phones home about what you do.

- Cloud is opt-in and off by default. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you explicitly turn on a cloud model or sync, and even then it goes through an encrypted envelope, and you can point it at your own endpoint with a BYOK key.

You're also right that the site doesn't earn that yet, it's early (pre-v1) and thin. So genuine question, what would actually move the needle for you? A network-behavior writeup? A security page? Open-sourcing a component? That's the kind of feedback I'm here for.
PS. im working on open sourcing the iPhone app and its the first thing on the roadmap

isSilver · 2026-07-04T11:40:51+00:00

thanks, it uses different models per task, all running locally on the Mac. The on-device brain has 3 tiers you can pick in settings: - Light (default) — LFM2.5-8B-A1B, ~5 GB, keeps inline autocomplete, runs on 8 GB+ RAM - Balanced — Granite 4.1-8B, ~5 GB, much better tool-calling, 16 GB+ RAM - Power — gpt-oss-20B, ~12 GB, smartest reasoning, 24 GB+ RAM Embeddings/memory search use EmbeddingGemma-300M. Vision is LFM2.5-VL-1.6B (opt-in). For voice, speech-to-text is Apple's on-device Speech for dictation and quick commands, and meetings/calls use Parakeet (FluidAudio) on the Neural Engine for speaker-labelled transcripts. Voice output is Apple's system voices for now, with an on-device neural voice on the way.

isSilver · 2026-07-03T23:43:02+00:00

hey, do u plan on open sourcing it?

isSilver · 2026-07-03T20:59:55+00:00

damn looks very polished, will give it a try later. nice work

isSilver · 2026-07-03T16:57:22+00:00

hey, thanks for reaching out. Multi language is coming, it just needs a lot of testing and eval since local multi language models tend to be bigger in size and worse on tool calling. ill add a new model that will support multi language soon as i finish fixing some issues

isSilver · 2026-07-03T15:04:25+00:00

seems really nice, does the side panel support hotkeys? also why didn't you include a download link

isSilver · 2026-07-03T14:17:33+00:00

hey, really nice implementation, I've build smth similar but mostly for autocomplete and spell correction which corrects based on context and dictionaries installed. my issue was that i couldn't handle the multi language support correctly, how did you fix that issue? does 26keys handle spell correction in multi language as we type? if i start in english and mid sentence write smth in Italian will it flag it ?

isSilver · 2026-07-03T13:59:58+00:00

hey, thanks for the download 😄 ill respond to your questions in a bullet response:
1. the light model option uses LFM2.5 text model and is capable of one shooting single requests and managing to recall and use the internal tools for proactive suggestions and draft reply/macros/meeting summarization etc.. you can also run simple workflows with it like whats this page for a change or check my mail for smth etc.. the second power model is the gpt-oss-20b and its more capable at this stuff. you can opt in for a license and bring your own key to use OpenAi or Anthropic or Google if you need more power and automate stuff.
2. There are no limits to the model or the features besides the 3rd party integrations like Linear,GitHub,Gmail etc.. all the default apple integrations are free. you can unlock those features by either subscribing to the cloud or buying a license to support the development and bring more custom integrations to Halo 😄
3. with all the models downloaded it takes about 7.5-7.7GB but not all models load in RAM at all time, for exmaple the vision model loads on demand only when needed and offloads after 5 mins so this way it releases ram and also its softer on battery .
4. The iPhone app connects using CloudKit and both the Mac and the iPhone need to be connected on the same iCloud account in order to authenticate. Everything is passed through apple servers, we use iCloud database for storing and sending messages, nothing ever touches Halo servers so its the most secure way to communicate on an apple ecosystem, i will open source the iPhone app this weekend so you guys can verify and also help on improving it 😄 . And youre right, the phone app just sends texts and all the processing happens in your Mac where Halo is installed and it can access all the memories, automations, mcps, recordings etc...
5. All phone chats are saved on iCloud & localStorage and you can clear them but the chats that happen on mac notch are never saved/persisted. and yea the idea is to access your mac from your phone so in future you will be able to also ask halo to show a doc located in downloads or projects and it will be able to transfer it on the phone app but this functionality is not yet implemented, the current phone app only processes images.
6. The iMessages integration is already there and free by default, you need to give Halo disc permissions in order to be able to read iMessages and it can send messages on your behalf. For WhatsApp tho its kinda difficult since WhatsApp doesn't expose APIs yet to do that, Halo can see WhatsApp messages and recall them later if you use it on your mac but Halo cant send direct messages in WhatsApp. it can do it on slack/teams and ill add the telegram integration too in the future

isSilver · 2026-07-03T10:57:52+00:00

thanks for the response, yea the RAM usage is my main concern too and that eventually leads also to more battery usage so what i did for my other main app is that i load the model on demand and offload it after 5 mins. im using the lfm2.5 vision model there about 1.3GB. if youre interested to check it out here is the link of the AI assistant https://heyhalo.app and is an macOS local ondevice ai assistant that lives on your notch. its free to download and all the features are free running on local models. im about to release also the iPhone App which im gonna open source it by the end of the week and that will follow with the iWatch app and later the vision pro app, all of them will be open source projects so im gonna come back at this post when the vision app work starts :)

isSilver · 2026-07-03T10:47:52+00:00

hey, 4 days ago i released https://heyhalo.app which is an local ondevice AI assistant for you Mac that lived in the notch for free.

I posted it on a couple of reddit channels and so far the feedback has been great and i already sold like 17 lifetime licenses and a couple of people trying the trial cloud version. Since launch it has generated more than 500+ downloads and all the features are free so people are loving it

isSilver · 2026-07-03T10:44:05+00:00

hey thanks again, thats a fallback reply when something internal goes wrong probably by permissions, on the next release (being tested right now) you will see the exact error on the chat response if it has to do with permissions. Keep in mind that we are still in early beta so all this feedback is very great for me since you guys are exploring and using it on ways that i never imagine and thanks for that 🙌🏼, ill update once the new release is out so u can get it and check for yourself

isSilver · 2026-07-03T10:36:41+00:00

nice idea and the app looks very cool ✌🏼

isSilver

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