AbstractAssistant

AbstractAssistant is a gateway-native desktop assistant for the AbstractFramework ecosystem: a macOS menu-bar app with a compact palette, a hands-free voice conversation mode, and a small CLI.

The desktop client stays thin. AbstractGateway owns workflow discovery, durable runs, provider connections, tool execution and policy, workspace policy, and multimodal defaults. The assistant keeps only local state: your chats, window placement, downloads, and the overrides you choose for this app.

Tray / Palette / CLI -> AbstractGateway -> AbstractRuntime -> AbstractCore -> Providers

What you get

• A menu-bar palette whose title tells you what the app is doing, with a recent-chat picker and a live gateway connection orb.
• Live run activity in the transcript: the current step, elapsed time, recent tool calls with their arguments and durations, and pause / resume / stop controls.
• Live replies: with Stream replies on (or left to a gateway that streams by default), the answer appears while the model writes it, with its reasoning folded away under Thinking; the finished answer replaces the live text.
• Tool approvals in a modeless sheet that shows the gateway's risk tier for each call and never blocks the palette; "always allow on this Mac" and per-chat trust for low-risk tools.
• A voice conversation mode (⌘⇧V): listen, send, speak, listen again — with a live status strip. Spoken replies stream from the gateway; dictation is a button away.
• A Settings window with seven sections: Connection, Models & reasoning (workflow, reasoning effort, reply streaming), Voice, Workspace (root and allowed folders), Tools & permissions, Appearance & window, About. Every value says whether it is the gateway default or this app's override. About is also on the menu-bar icon (About AbstractAssistant…).
• Local, persistent overrides for every route the assistant drives (chat, voice, image, video, music, sound) that ride each request without touching the gateway's shared defaults.
• Per-answer statistics (tokens, tools, files, duration, model) with clickable detail views.
• Multi-attachment composer with an image gallery, drag and drop, and artifact previews.

Install

pip install "abstractassistant[voice]"

The voice extra adds local microphone capture (dictation and voice conversations). The base install covers text chat, spoken replies and gateway-backed media; STT and TTS run on the gateway either way.

Requirements: Python 3.10+, an AbstractGateway you can reach. AbstractCore is installed as a dependency (its minimum version is set in pyproject.toml). macOS is the primary tray target; Linux and Windows may work but are not packaged to the same standard.

Quick start

Start a local gateway for development:

export ABSTRACTGATEWAY_FLOWS_DIR="$PWD/abstractgateway/flows/bundles"
export ABSTRACTGATEWAY_AUTH_TOKEN="your-shared-token"
abstractgateway serve --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080

Launch the tray assistant:

assistant

Run a single terminal turn:

assistant run --prompt "Search the web for the latest OpenAI news and summarize it with sources."

Connection overrides:

assistant --gateway-url http://127.0.0.1:8080 --gateway-token "$ABSTRACTGATEWAY_AUTH_TOKEN"

--gateway-url on its own is enough when you have already signed in to that gateway: the app reuses the sign-in saved in ~/.abstractassistant/gateway_connection.json.

If the gateway runs the AbstractGateway console, the simplest way to start the assistant is Open on its card there: the console launches the app already signed in as you, and the app remembers that sign-in for later launches. The console can sign in only an Assistant it launches, so quit a running Assistant before you click Open.

Each turn runs the gateway's default workflow for the assistant (abstractassistant.agent.v1). When the gateway sets none, the app runs its built-in orchestrator, the abstractassistant-orchestrator workflow it publishes to your tenant catalog. You can pick another assistant workflow in Settings → Models → Workflow.

Defaults and durability

The gateway is the source of truth for the published workflow, provider and model defaults, tool inventory and approval defaults, workspace policy, run history, waits and artifacts.

The desktop client stores under ~/.abstractassistant/:

• preferences.json — this app's overrides and preferences (model routes, reasoning effort, reply streaming, workspace grant, voice options, tool modes, hotkey, window size)
• gateway_connection.json — gateway URL and sign-in state
• sessions/ — chat snapshots, last run ids and each chat's granted workspace folder
• downloads and cached audio

Documentation

Start with docs/README.md.

• docs/INSTALLATION.md
• docs/getting-started.md
• docs/settings.md
• docs/voice.md
• docs/architecture.md
• docs/api.md
• docs/faq.md
• docs/troubleshooting.md
• docs/adr/README.md

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen python -m pytest tests/basic -q

Project links

• Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md
• Security: SECURITY.md
• Code of conduct: CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
• Changelog: CHANGELOG.md
• Acknowledgments: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.md
• License: LICENSE