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:
- 📧 Email + Agent Mail — Manage inboxes and send from your assistant's own email address
- 📅 Google Calendar — Check schedules, create events, and coordinate availability
- 🌤️ Weather + Start the Day — Get forecasts and personalized daily briefings
- 🖥️ Computer Use + Screen Watch — Control your Mac and optionally monitor screen context
- 📞 Phone Calls + Messaging — Handle calls and messages across channels like Slack and WhatsApp
- 🌐 Browser + Research — Search the web, extract information, and synthesize findings
- 💻 Claude Code + ACP — Delegate coding tasks to internal and external coding agents
- 🏗️ App Builder + Document — Create interactive apps and long-form documents on the fly
- 🖼️ Image Studio + Media Processing — Generate/edit images and process video/audio/image files
- 🎧 Transcribe — Turn audio and video into text with Whisper
- 🧠 Tasks + Schedule + Followups — Run recurring workflows, reminders, and message follow-up queues
- 🔔 Notifications + Watcher + Playbooks — Monitor events and trigger automated actions
- 🛍️ Amazon + DoorDash — Shop and place delivery orders when you ask
- 🔗 Integrations + Skill Management — Connect tools and add custom skills as your needs evolve
- 🎙️ 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 — Full-featured menu bar app with desktop automation
- Channels — Reach your assistant via Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, email, or phone
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 — up to 50 steps per task. Sensitive actions require your explicit permission first.
- 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.