Help/Messages and calls
Voice calls
Call your Moon or any Orb and talk instead of typing. It listens, works, and answers out loud. Voice calls with the Moon, Claude and Grok are on the Mac.
Voice calls are Mac only for now. On Windows, Codex chats can still talk on Codex's own voice line, from the microphone in the message box.
Start a call
- With an Orb: open the chat and click the microphone in the message box. The call is about that chat.
- With your Moon: click the call button in your Moon's chat (Call Juno, with your Moon's name).
The first time, macOS asks for the microphone (and, before macOS 26, speech recognition). Say yes, or allow it later in System Settings, Privacy & Security, Microphone.
On the call
A call bar shows who you're talking to and what it's doing: Listening, Working on it… or Speaking, with the last few lines said.
| To | Do this |
|---|---|
| Interrupt | Just talk over it. It stops and listens. |
| Push to talk | Hold Space while the call bar has focus, and let go when you're done. |
| Mute | Click the microphone button on the bar. Hold Space to talk while muted. |
| Change how it answers | Pick Chat for short spoken replies with no tools unless you ask, or Work for the normal chat with one spoken line per reply. |
| Change the voice | Click the arrow on the bar (Voice) and pick under Voice for this chat. Each chat keeps its own. |
| End | Click End, or the microphone in the message box again. |
If you open another chat during a call, a small bar reminds you who you're on a call with, with Open to go back.
Voices and hearing
Open Settings, then Voice.
- Hearing and voices: Cloud (the default) or On this Mac. See below.
- Orbit's voices: a one-off download (about 95 MB) of free voices that run on your Mac. Until you set them up, calls use your Mac's built-in voices.
- Your Moon's voice, and a voice for Claude and Grok chats.
- Speed, how long a pause means you've finished talking, and how much speech it takes to interrupt it.
Cloud or on this Mac
Calls start in Cloud mode, which comes with an Orbit subscription:
- Hearing: your call audio streams from your Mac straight to AssemblyAI, which turns it into text. Orbit's server only hands your Mac a short-lived pass for each stream.
- Voices: each sentence the Orb says comes back through Orbit's server from Inworld's voices.
- Allowance: cloud use is counted per month. Settings shows how many minutes of cloud hearing are left. Past the allowance, or whenever the cloud can't be reached, calls carry on with your Mac's own hearing and voices.
Choose On this Mac and calls hear and speak on this Mac only: free, private, a little slower to answer. Speech is recognised by macOS, and the voice is Orbit's own voices or your Mac's. Nothing you say or hear leaves your Mac for the call itself; what you say still goes to your AI model as text, like typing. More on this on the security page.
Transcripts of Zoom, Meet and Teams calls are different: they're always turned into text in the cloud, by AssemblyAI, on Mac and Windows. See Transcripts.
Common questions
Can the Orb do real work on a call?
Yes. In Work mode it's the normal chat: it can use its tools, edit files and browse while you talk, and tells you in one spoken line what it did. Everything also appears in the chat as text.
Does a voice call use my AI plan?
Yes. The Orb's thinking runs on your own Claude, Grok or Codex sign-in, the same as typing.
Related: Transcripts, What the Moon does, Send any time.
Updated 24 October 2026 · Orbit 0.1.15