A lightweight macOS menubar app that bridges OpenHome voice AI to your local machine.
Porch sits in your system tray, maintains a persistent WebSocket connection to your OpenHome device, and lets OpenHome Abilities execute commands on your Mac — no inbound ports, no tunnels, no config.
Early development. Not yet functional.
OpenHome Device Your Mac
─────────────── ────────
Ability (main.py) ←── WebSocket ───→ Porch.app (menubar)
(outbound from Mac) │
Process / API / AppleScript
OpenHome Abilities run in the cloud but can't access your local network. Porch solves this by connecting outward to OpenHome and receiving commands through that tunnel. No firewall holes, no port forwarding.
- Native Swift menubar app (~5MB, ~15MB RAM)
- Persistent WebSocket connection to OpenHome
- Command execution via
exec_local_command()protocol - Launch at login
- Connection status indicator
- Configurable command allowlists
- OpenHome — Voice AI platform
- OpenHome Docs — Platform documentation
- OpenHome Abilities — Open-source voice AI plugins
- OpenHome Abilities SDK Reference — Complete SDK docs
- Local Template — The Python-based local client this project replaces
- macOS 14.0+ (Sonoma)
- An OpenHome account and API key