site/talon/index

What it does

Voice & video calls Call any ship 1:1. Signalling rides Urbit. Media is WebRTC, peer to peer where it can be. Rings in the background on Android and iOS. Camera on or off, front or back.
Party lines A standing voice room for a group. Its guest list mirrors the group's own roster and roles. See who's on the line before you join, turn cameras on for a small conference, and message anyone from the roster.
Recording & transcripts Record a party line per speaker. Everyone on it sees the badge. Transcribe with your own Whisper-compatible key, then publish the transcript to Lattice as a urb:// link.
urb:// links Inline preview cards for Urbit links, opened in-app through the Lattice reader. Publish a whole thread to Lattice from its menu.
Direct messages 1:1 messages with anyone on the network. Same wire as the rest of Urbit, so your existing chats appear immediately.
Group channels Read and post in any chat channel of any group your ship belongs to. Pinned posts, drag-reorder, custom folders.
Notebooks & galleries Read and reply to long-form notebook posts (%diary) and image-grid gallery posts (%heap) inside the same UI.
Reactions & threads Full emoji set. Long-press for actions. Replies live in inline threads, not separate views.
Polls /poll question | a | b | c. Votes ride on the existing reactions wire, with no new agent state.
Semantic search Find that chat you half-remember. The embedder runs on-device, MediaPipe on Android and ONNX MiniLM-L6 on desktop. Private. Nothing leaves your machine.
Daily digest Optional morning brief. Who pinged you, what watchwords matched, the chats you missed. Local AI summary, plus today's weather. Android only, since it depends on AlarmManager.
Watchwords Cross-channel keyword alerts. Tracks any term you care about across every chat your ship sees, foreground or background.
AI features Catch-me-up summaries and emoji-react suggestions, using your own OpenAI / Anthropic / compatible API key. Off by default. Key encrypted on-device.
Voice messages Record, send, and play back voice notes inline. On-device transcription on devices that support it.
Native notifications libnotify on Linux, Notification Center on macOS, system toasts on Windows and Android. No AWT-balloon ugliness.
Multi-ship at once Sign in to as many ships as you like and switch from the top-left. The active ship's color tints the send button, so you don't accidentally post as the wrong identity in shared groups.

What it isn't

Not a host. Bring your own ship. Yours, or one a friend hosts for you, or one of the hosting services.
Not Tlon. Talon talks to the same agents but is an independent client. If you already use a Tlon-hosted ship, Talon sees your full history immediately.
Not on the Play Store today. Sideload from GitHub Releases. The in-app updater handles future versions on Android. The iOS build is in TestFlight. Ask ~nisfeb for an invite.
Desktop builds are unsigned for now. Gatekeeper and SmartScreen will warn on first launch, and you have to bypass it.

Privacy

The only servers Talon talks to are yours, or ones you chose.

There's no analytics, no third-party SDKs, no telemetry. Chat speaks only to the Urbit ship you point it at. If you turn on AI features or transcription, add the provider whose key you've entered. That's the whole surface for messaging.

Calls need a little more. Signalling stays ship-to-ship over Urbit. Media goes peer to peer when it can, and otherwise through a TURN relay. Party lines mix audio on an SFU that the hosting ship picks. Both run in a small self-hostable sidecar built on Galène and coturn, with a hosted default so calls work out of the box. Background ringing on iOS goes through a small push relay. It sees a device token and which ship is calling, never any content, and it is self-hostable too.

API keys are stored encrypted on-device and only sent to the provider you select. They never reach the Talon developer.

Under the hood

Kotlin + Compose Multiplatform. One shared codebase across Android, iOS and JVM Desktop. Per-platform leaves exist only where they have to, for file pickers, WebRTC bindings, CallKit, on-device AI backends and native notifications. Room for local storage, OkHttp for the SSE channel, kotlinx.serialization for everything on the wire. Calls are a small Hoon agent, %trunk, plus WebRTC. Party lines run on Galène. Mutation-tested on the parsers and wire helpers, with a JVM test suite behind every release.

android

8.0+ (API 26-35)

ios

TestFlight · calls, party lines, video

desktop

Linux · macOS · Windows · JRE bundled

backend

Your Urbit ship

license

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0

Download

Pick your platform. Direct download links resolve to the latest tagged release. Fall back to the releases page for older versions, signature checksums, and release notes.

iOS

In TestFlight, invite-only while it settles. Ask ~nisfeb and you're on the list.

Android

On install, tap the APK. You may need to allow "Install unknown apps" for your browser or file manager. Future updates land via the in-app banner.

arm64-v8a Most modern Android phones (~25 MB). Pick this one if unsure. Download

armeabi-v7a Older 32-bit ARM devices (~20 MB). Download

x86_64 Emulators / x86 tablets (~18 MB). Download

universal Larger fallback (~54 MB). Works on every supported ABI. Download

Linux

chmod +x the AppImage and run it. It needs FUSE 2, which most desktops have by default. The .deb installs system-wide on Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives.

AppImage (any) Portable, self-contained, ~91 MB. Bundled JRE. Download

.deb (Debian / Ubuntu) sudo apt install ./talon_*.deb Download

macOS

Open the DMG and drag Talon to Applications. First launch: right-click → Open → Open. (Unsigned, so a normal double-click is blocked by Gatekeeper.)

.dmg Universal disk image. Bundled JRE. Download

Windows

Double-click the MSI to install. SmartScreen may warn. Click "More info", then "Run anyway".

.msi x64 installer. Bundled JRE. Download

New to Urbit? urbit.org/overview/running-urbit walks you through booting a ship. Once you have the ship's HTTP URL and the +code output, log in inside Talon and you're done.

Source & issues