What's new.

Halo gets to work

• Build an automation by drawing it. Automations have a real canvas now: drag out a step, connect it to the next one, and see your work flow through it. Every step says what it's actually set to do, so you can read a whole automation at a glance instead of opening five panels to find out.
• Or just describe it. Tell Halo "when a customer emails me, summarize it, file a ticket, and text me" and it lays the whole thing out on the canvas for you to check and adjust. There's a starter library too, for the jobs people ask for most.
• Proper building blocks. Branch on a condition, split down several paths, join them back together, loop once per item, filter, sort, remove duplicates, take the top few, wait for hours or days (it survives a restart), or stop early. Halo can also call any web API, run a little code, run a shell command, and keep a running list between runs, which is how "have I already handled this one?" finally has an answer.
• Try it before you trust it. Run an automation against your real data and watch it light up step by step, with the number of items travelling down each connection. Test up to one step and stop there. Nothing gets sent while you're testing.
• See exactly what happened. Every run is kept. Replay one on the canvas, open any step and read what it produced, and if something broke, the step that broke is marked. Automations that failed and haven't been looked at say so in the list.
• Stop actually stops. A run in flight has a stop button, including partway through a loop.
• Choose the brain per step. Any thinking step can run on your Mac, through Halo Cloud, or on your own API key, picked step by step. A quick sorting decision can stay on-device while the step that writes the email uses your best model.
• Halo can ask before it acts. Any step can pause and wait for your OK in the notch, then carry on where it left off.
• Triggers that match how your apps really work. Pick the exact event: an issue assigned to you, one moved to a status, a comment, someone mentioning you, a review on a pull request. Give one automation several triggers, each with its own filter. Or run it on a schedule, on a Mac event, or once and then never again.
• Agents: someone to hand a standing job to. Give an agent a job in plain language ("keep an eye on our competitors' pricing"), a model, and what it's allowed to read, and it works away at it, keeps a notebook of what it has learned, checks its own findings before reporting, and posts the result into its own chat. You can talk to any agent about its work, and export one to share it.
• Agents can watch for things. Teach an agent to keep an eye on something and it checks on a sensible rhythm, tells you when something actually changed, and doesn't repeat itself. Everything it's currently watching is listed in one place, with a way to stop it.
• Halo can hand real work to Claude Code or Codex. Wire a hand-off into an automation or an agent and Halo briefs the coding assistant, shows you what it wants to do before anything runs, keeps it to one folder at a time so two of them can't collide, and reports back into the automation that asked, with the result feeding the next step. Halo watched over your terminal sessions before; now it can start the work itself.
• Halo can be a tool for your coding assistant, too. Turn on Halo's own connection in Settings, paste the config it gives you, and Claude Code or Codex can build and run automations and agents for you.
• Connect anything with an MCP server. A step can fetch from and post to any connected tool, either as a fixed chain you set up or with Halo working out the calls from a goal you describe. Remote servers you sign into work now, servers you already set up in other apps can be imported, and an MCP server can be what starts an automation.
• Halo makes pictures, on your Mac. Ask for a picture in chat or add it as a step, and it's drawn on your machine and never leaves it. Change part of a picture you already have by describing the change. Send several pictures in and get several back. Video is there too, through your own API key.
• Halo reads files now, not just text. Hand a step a PDF, a scan, or a photo and it reads what's in it.
• Text Halo on Signal. Link Signal the same way you'd link Signal Desktop, and there's a "Halo" chat in your Signal you can message like a person. It answers from your Mac, pictures work in both directions, and nudges still land in Note to Self so they don't clutter your notes.
• Send Halo a file to start a job. An automation wired to Signal gets its own chat; drop a photo or a document in and that's what it runs on.
• Teach Halo how you do things. Drop in a page of your own know-how, or teach it in conversation, and Halo applies it whenever the work calls for it, in chat, in automations, and in agents.
• Halo runs on a lot more Macs. The requirement dropped from macOS 26 to macOS 15, so Macs that couldn't run Halo at all now can.
• Setup understands a Mac that can't fit a local brain. If there isn't room for the on-device model, Halo says so up front and sets you up on the cloud instead of dead-ending, and you can hand over your key during setup rather than hunting for it afterwards.
• Get your disk back. If you've moved to the cloud, Halo can free the on-device model with one click, and put it back when you want it.
• Long cloud answers stopped getting cut off. Replies used to be silently truncated partway through; they're not any more.
• Running out of your cloud allowance doesn't stop you. Halo carries on with the on-device brain instead of failing.
• Halo stopped going deaf. Fixed the bug where Halo quietly stopped listening after a while and only a restart brought it back, and the one where it cut you off mid-sentence, and the one where it answered its own voice. Voice runs on one path now instead of two that kept drifting apart.
• Call an agent by name. Each agent can have its own "Hey <name>" phrase, and the listening indicator is the same everywhere.
• Halo reads web pages properly. It keeps the actual article instead of the site's menus and cookie banners, keeps links where they belong in the text, and can work through a page step by step when a task needs it.
• Settings had a clear-out. Fewer, better-organized sections, and Integrations, Agents, Skills, Automations and connected tools all got a proper redesign.
• Halo is lighter on your Mac. A long list of things that used to spin the CPU in the background, from the automation canvas to autocomplete to agent checks, now stay quiet when nothing is happening.
• Connect any email account. New in Settings → Integrations: "IMAP/SMTP - Any Email" links Gmail, iCloud, Fastmail, or your own mail server with one app password. Your recent mail becomes searchable ("what did the landlord say about the lease?"), and Halo can send and reply through your own server, always after you confirm. Replies land inside the original thread, not as a new conversation.
• Connect any calendar and address book. "CalDAV/CardDAV - Any Calendar" brings a Fastmail, Nextcloud, iCloud, or self-hosted account into Halo's calendar answers, briefings, and meeting prep, right next to what macOS already knows, and its address books help Halo recognize the people you mention. Halo can create events on it too, after you confirm.
• Watch your inbox or calendar. An automation can wait for real mail or a new event, let a reply go out on its own for the ones you explicitly trust with that, shape every draft with your own standing instructions ("two short sentences, sign as Silver"), and reach you over iMessage so nudges get to your phone.
• Go through a folder of receipts. Ask Halo to organize a folder of receipt photos and invoice PDFs and it reads each one on your Mac, extracts the vendor, amount, date, and category, and writes a tidy CSV next to them, then tells you the totals. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. There's a ready-made automation for it, and it takes emailed invoices too.
• Halo can read images and scans now. Ask about a screenshot, a photographed document, or a scanned PDF by path and Halo reads the text right off it, on-device.
• Choose which screen the notch lives on. Settings → General → Notch: keep Halo on your MacBook's built-in display, pin it to one monitor, or let it follow the screen you're using.
• Cloud replies are much faster. Conversations through Halo Cloud now route to consistently fast servers and reuse more of their context between turns; tool-using replies that took 10 to 27 seconds now typically land in about 5.
• Honest quota display. If you run fully on-device or with your own key, Settings no longer shows cloud usage bars that don't apply to you.
• Gmail's card now points you somewhere that works today: connect Gmail through "IMAP/SMTP - Any Email" for full read and send, no Google sign-in required.
• The menu bar icon is easier to spot against a dark menu bar.
• Notes stopped popping open on its own. Halo's background reading of your notes now happens invisibly instead of launching the Notes app onto your screen after every restart.
• Approvals are sturdier. The 5-second undo window survives closing and reopening the notch, a confirmed action can never run twice, round buttons respond anywhere on the button (not just the icon), and Halo will never send email to an address it guessed: if it doesn't know the address, it asks.
• Mail bodies always read as text. Some emails (Google alerts, many newsletters) used to surface as unreadable encoded text in chat; they decode properly now.
• Small voice work: replies from the on-device assistant carry a bit more of Halo's dry warmth, and asking Halo to reply to a message no longer gets mistaken for small talk.

A quick follow-up

• Fixed the "what I'm working on" card for a delegated task showing up split across two disconnected pieces of the notch instead of as one clean card.

A smarter brain, and Halo does more in one go

• A new on-device brain. Halo now runs a new local model that replies faster, uses less memory (it's comfortable on an 8 GB Mac), and is noticeably better at actually getting things done for you and at working in other languages. As always, it runs entirely on your Mac.
• Ask for several things in one message. Say "schedule a team standup tomorrow at 10, remind me 30 minutes before, and post it to the sales channel in Slack" and Halo lays out the plan, then works through each part and confirms it as it goes.
• Post to a Slack channel, not just a person. Ask Halo to send something to a channel like sales and it posts there, alongside the direct messages it already handled.
• Stop really stops. Say "stop" or clear the chat and Halo halts whatever it's in the middle of, right away. It also no longer gets stuck thinking you told it to stop when you didn't.
• Every step gets its own answer. When you ask for two or more things at once, Halo tells you how each one turned out, not just the last.
• No accidental repeats. In the middle of a longer task, Halo won't redo something it already did for you.
• Goals, not just one-off tasks. Give Halo something ongoing to work toward and it tracks progress, checks back in, and adjusts the plan as things change, instead of forgetting the moment the conversation ends.
• Faster, more accurate routing. Halo now decides what you're asking for, and whether it needs to search your memory or pull up a document, in one confident step instead of guessing its way there.
• Quicker search through your memory. Looking things up in what Halo remembers is noticeably snappier, especially the more history you build up with it.
• Automations stay in sync. Turning an automation on or off now shows the same state everywhere in the app right away, instead of occasionally drifting out of sync between the notch and Settings.
• Goals and automations no longer duplicate. Asking Halo to create one, especially when the request has a few parts to it, used to sometimes create two or three near-identical copies. Now it makes exactly one.
• Savings and count-up goals add up correctly. A goal like "save $5,000" now tracks the running total from everything you've logged, not just your last entry — and Halo will ask for your target and timeline instead of inventing numbers when you haven't given any.
• Better answers about your calendar, notes, and goals. Questions like "what's on my calendar today" or "add notes on the notes app" now reliably reach the right tool instead of occasionally getting written out as a stray document.
• More reliable recall. Asking Halo to recall something — including a follow-up like "do you recall anything about it" — no longer misses things that are genuinely in your memory, and Halo won't mix in details from an unrelated topic.
• Halo doesn't talk over itself. Fixed a bug where a voice reply to an action (like adding a calendar event) could get spoken twice.
• Cleaner chat layout. The notch header no longer grows and pushes your conversation out of view, and a short chat now starts right at the top instead of floating in the middle of the panel.
• Fixed a rare crash on quit if you closed Halo while its on-device brain was still loading.
• Halo can supervise Claude Code sessions. Run Claude Code from your terminal and Halo watches over it from the notch, showing a clear card for anything it wants to do so you can approve, allow the rest of the session, or deny it — right where you're already working, under "Working on."

A handful of new things Halo can do

• Ask Halo to play what you want. Say "play my Focus playlist," "put on some jazz," or "play Taylor Swift" and it starts it in Apple Music, on top of the play, pause, skip, and "what's playing?" it already handled for Apple Music and Spotify.
• Control your home by voice, through your own Shortcuts. Make a shortcut with a Home action (lights, locks, a scene) in Apple's Shortcuts app, name it something you'd say out loud, and Halo runs it when you ask. It even matches a spoken or close name, so "good night" finds your "Good Night" shortcut.
• Two new cards in Settings, under Integrations. Music and Shortcuts & Home each explain what Halo can do, and Shortcuts & Home shows you the exact shortcuts it can run and links you straight to the Shortcuts app to make more.
• Automation now appears in Settings, under Permissions, so if you ever turned Halo's control of Music or Shortcuts off, you have a clear way back to it.
• Turn a follow-up into a reply without leaving the notch. When someone's waiting on you, the card now shows your recent chat with that person inline, as a real back-and-forth, drafts a reply in your voice, and lets you send it straight back in Slack or iMessage.
• A five-second undo on anything Halo sends or runs. Send a reply, or approve an action, and a short countdown appears first with a way to cancel, so you can catch it before it goes out.
• Halo stops nagging once you've handled it. Before surfacing a follow-up it checks the actual conversation, and if your reply is already the latest message, it stays quiet.
• Cleaner, clearer replies. The inline chat reads like a real thread with the other person on the left and you on the right, and Halo now speaks to you directly instead of accidentally addressing the person it just messaged.

Halo comes to iPhone

• Halo is coming to your iPhone. A companion app that lets you text Halo from your phone is on its way to the App Store. Your message rides your own iCloud and your Mac does the thinking, so it stays as private as everything else Halo does.
• The iPhone app is open source. Every line lives on GitHub at github.com/HeyHalo-App/heyhalo-ios (and the shared message format at github.com/HeyHalo-App/heyhalo-reach-kit), so anyone can read exactly how it works and confirm your messages only ever travel through your own iCloud.
• Smoother in the background. Fixed a rare freeze and stopped Halo from quietly checking your browser while you're just browsing, so it stays out of your way.

The bigger on-device models play nicer

• Magic Reply now works with the bigger models. Magic Reply and the quick draft tweaks (fix, formal, casual, shorten) did nothing after you switched to the Balanced or Power on-device model. They now run on that model, so you get stronger drafts wherever you write.
• The bigger models are gentler on your Mac. Switching to Balanced or Power no longer makes the whole system stutter. Halo now runs them in smaller steps that leave room for the rest of your Mac to stay smooth, with no real hit to speed.
• Steadier on-screen sparkle and menus. Under a heavy burst of activity from some apps, the autocomplete sparkle and Halo's menus could get stuck on screen and stop responding. They now stay put and dismiss cleanly.

Quieter on memory, smoother sign-in

• Fixed a memory drain. Once you tried the Balanced or Power on-device model, a large background process could keep running after you quit Halo, holding several GB of memory and leaving your Mac sluggish with janky animations. Halo now shuts that process down cleanly the moment you quit.
• Reinstalling Halo on the same Mac no longer counts as a new device. Before, a fresh install could quietly use up your 2-Mac limit and lock you out of signing in. Your Mac is now remembered across reinstalls, and if you ever do reach the limit, Halo shows a clear message with a button to manage your devices.

A Halo that knows you, with much sharper recall

• Halo learns who you are. Tell it your name or just say "call me Silver" in chat and it uses that everywhere; set your pronouns so it addresses you naturally; and if it still doesn't know what to call you after a few days, it asks once, gently. Your names and handles now live in one place under Profile, and Halo never files your own words under someone else.
• Recall got a real upgrade. It now captures more of what you actually see and do, every app, tab, and chat you move through, and keeps a complete record on your Mac. Answers rank so the memory that matters wins instead of stray text off your screen, and chat conversations turn into lasting memories with the right "who said what." When someone gives you a deadline, it becomes a real due date.
• Follow-ups are more useful and far less noisy. Halo drafts a reply right in the card so you can copy it without opening a chat, puts what's due soonest at the top, only surfaces conversations genuinely waiting on you, shows one row per conversation instead of duplicates, and never nags you about your own messages. What you dismiss now stays dismissed after a restart.
• Your Apple apps are now part of the welcome flow. Messages, Mail, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes each get a one-tap grant, a plain note about what access they need and why, and recall switched on by default for Mail and Notes so Halo can answer questions about them right away. You can turn any of it off whenever you like.
• First-time setup is more reliable. Finishing the welcome steps now brings Halo to life properly, and when a permission needs a restart to take effect, Halo says so instead of quietly doing nothing.
• The menu bar shows when setup isn't finished, with a clear "Finish setup" button and the other actions held back until Halo is ready.
• Closing the welcome window before you're done now quits Halo cleanly, so reopening picks straight up where you left off.
• Asking Halo about your mail or calendar before access is granted now tells you exactly what to turn on, instead of saying it found nothing.
• The notch chat now renders formatted answers (bold, lists, and links), and when Halo answers from memory it shows the sources it used as chips you can tap to open the page, reveal the file, or play the recording.
• Added a Balanced on-device model, a middle option between the fast one and the thorough one, so you can trade a little speed for better answers without going all the way up.
• A batch of fixes across calendar, call detection, and how Halo reads in chat.

Halo opens reliably now

• Fixed the big one: Halo would look like it launched and then nothing would happen, no window, no sign of it running. A packaging slip left a core part of the app out of the build, so it quit the instant it opened. The download now includes everything it needs and starts up normally.

No surprise permission prompts while browsing

• Halo no longer pops up "wants access to control your browser" out of nowhere. That request used to appear on any browser page with a video or audio playing, even when you weren't recording. Now it only asks the moment you actually start recording a call, and the message clearly explains what the access is for.

A smoother first run

• Granting the microphone and calendar during setup works now. Tapping Grant on those two could previously do nothing, while speech and screen access worked fine. Both now bring up the system prompt the moment you tap, so the mic, call recording, and pre-meeting briefs are ready right away.
• The setup wizard picks up where you left off. When granting a permission asks you to quit and reopen Halo, you come back to the same step instead of starting over from the welcome screen.

Chat that follows through, and a warmer voice

• Asking Halo about your calendar, your reminders, or anything it can look up now reliably gets a real answer. It follows through on the lookup instead of occasionally stalling out with a generic "Hey, what's up?".
• Follow-up questions keep their context. Ask "what's on my calendar today", then just "what about tomorrow?", and Halo knows you still mean your calendar, and answers for the right day.
• Halo no longer talks over itself. When it reads an answer aloud it won't mistake its own voice for you interrupting and cut off mid-sentence.
• Spoken replies sound like a person, not a data readout. No more dates and timestamps announced like a newspaper headline, and the voice is warmer and gets to the point.
• When you talk to Halo, your words now appear in the message box as you speak, so it's clear it's hearing you.
• A warmer, more consistent voice throughout. Halo greets you by name and speaks with calm, dry confidence, from the morning hello to the little status lines while it's working, the suggestions it offers, and the briefings and summaries it reads back.
• Turning on the microphone, speech, and calendar permissions now works the way it should. If you'd turned one of them down before, the button in Settings takes you straight to the right spot in System Settings instead of doing nothing.
• First-run setup now offers the microphone, dictation, and calendar right up front, so the mic, call recording, and meeting prep are ready the first time you reach for them.
• A clearer reminder that the microphone, like screen recording, needs a quick quit and relaunch right after you grant it for the change to take effect.
• Fixed a stray permission warning that could flash in Settings for a minute right after launch and then clear itself. It was harmless, just confusing.

Halo on your phone, and a more proactive companion

• Halo on your iPhone. Reach Halo from your phone and it answers with everything it knows back on your Mac. When you step away it can send you a heads-up, and the Dynamic Island keeps you posted on whatever it's working on. Everything sensitive still lives on your Mac.
• A more proactive Halo. It now spots things worth handling, gets them ready in a "Ready for you" area for one-tap approval, and quietly takes care of the safe, easy-to-undo ones on its own. While you're out, it saves what happened into a single catch-up digest instead of a stream of pings.
• Standing requests and scheduled tasks. Ask Halo to do something on a schedule, or whenever a certain situation comes up, and it handles it in the background. It always checks with you first before anything that can't be undone.
• More horsepower when you need it. Switch on the Power option in AI Models for a noticeably stronger brain on long chats and summaries. It's optional, runs entirely on your Mac, and uses more memory while it's on.
• Optional browser help. With your go-ahead, Halo can read the page you're on and fill in forms for you. Banking and payment sites are always off-limits.
• Simpler sign-in and clearer limits. You can sign in even without a subscription, and your Halo Cloud usage now shows at a glance as a current-session and weekly view.
• A bit more personality. Spoken replies are warmer and wittier, and they call back to things you've talked about before.
• Plus on-device contact names, sharper meeting prep, steadier calendar timing, and a long list of fixes and polish.

Sharper transcripts & reusable writing presets

• Meeting & call transcripts are noticeably more accurate — a new on-device speech model now handles recordings, especially long, multi-speaker calls. Still 100% on your Mac; dictation and the "Hey Halo" trigger stay instant as before.
• Writing presets — save your own reply and rewrite instructions once and reuse them as chips in Magic Reply (⌃⇧R) and Rewrite (⌃⇧W). Halo remembers which preset fits each app, so the right one is already picked for wherever you're writing.
• Voice output now uses your Mac's built-in voices. For the most natural sound, install an Apple Premium voice in System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content.
• Polish across Magic Reply and Rewrite, plus the usual round of fixes.

First public beta

• Halo is now in public beta on Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 26.
• Writing — ghost-text autocomplete in your own voice, inline everywhere you type, plus Magic Reply and quick "/" macros.
• Voice — dictation, the "Hey Halo" trigger, and spoken answers, all on-device.
• Calls & meetings — one-shortcut recording with live, speaker-labeled transcripts, live translation, and after-the-call summaries.
• Memory & recall — ask about anything you've seen or said, person dossiers, and a morning briefing.
• Assistant — drafts replies, sends messages, and manages your calendar and reminders, always with a confirmation.
• Halo Cloud (optional) — a frontier model for heavier chat and long summaries; everything ambient still stays on your Mac.
• Automatic updates — Halo keeps itself up to date in the background.