Vellum Mobile brings Voice Mode and Mac control to iOS

Vellum has taken its mobile app to full parity with its desktop and web clients, giving iPhone and Android owners the same assistant that until now did its heaviest work on a Mac. The app is free on the App Store and Google Play Store, and connects to either a cloud assistant or a self-hosted one.

Voice mode carries most of the release. Conversations run natively on the device and open from Siri, the Action Button, the Control Center, or a home screen shortcut. Once a session is running, Live Activities on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island show what the assistant is doing and let users approve or deny sensitive actions without reopening the app. The camera can be turned on mid-call, so a document, a broken part, or a screen can be shown instead of described, and the assistant talks through the frame in real time. Speech recognition defaults to multilingual, with a picker for locking a single listening language when accuracy matters more than switching.

The second half of the release is to reach back into the desktop. While a paired Mac is awake and running the desktop app, the assistant can write and edit local files, move files between its own workspace and the machine, run shell commands for deploys, scripts, and installs, and drive the browser and other applications. Recurring schedules can be created or changed from anywhere. App building, document drafting, note-taking, and image generation all run from the phone, and teams can pair self-hosted assistants by URL when running the open-source daemon on their own hardware.

Vellum is built by Vocify Inc., a New York company founded in 2023 by Akash Sharma, Noa Flaherty, and Sidd Seethepalli. It went through Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch and has raised roughly $25.5 million, including a $20 million Series A led by Leaders Fund. The company started with an enterprise platform for building and evaluating LLM applications, then extended into personal assistants and opened that codebase in April. Every assistant carries its own identity, memory, filesystem, and email address, and stays reachable through Slack, Telegram, email, and phone alongside the first-party apps. Model routing spans hosted models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google as well as local models through Ollama, with paid plans starting at 30 dollars a month.

Putting voice, camera, scheduling, and remote machine control on the device that stays in a pocket moves the assistant into the hours of a day spent away from a desk.