Friday is out in public beta. It's a desktop AI personal assistant: you ask in plain language, and it runs a tool loop on your own machine until the work is actually done. It's also live on Product Hunt — support is welcome.
Why another assistant
Most assistants are a chat box in a browser tab. They can describe the work but can't do it, and everything you type ends up in someone else's hosted account. I wanted the opposite trade: a normal desktop app that can touch my files and my shell, with the keys and the history staying on my disk.
Chat that acts
Friday reads files, applies multi-file patches, runs shell commands, keeps long-running processes open, searches the web, and drives a real browser. The loop keeps going until the task is finished instead of stopping at the first answer — which is the difference between "here's a script you could run" and the script having run.
Local and private
It's an Electron app. Provider keys, conversation history, memory, projects, and generated media live in your local application data, not in a hosted account. Your input leaves the machine only for the provider, MCP server, website, or channel a given task actually needs.
Approval before action
Every tool carries its own policy. Reads are permissive; file edits, patches, and shell commands ask first, and you can deny, allow once, or always allow. An agent with shell access is only reasonable if you decide what it's allowed to touch.
Bring your own providers
There's no bundled model and no resold inference. You add your own keys and pick a provider and model independently for each capability — assistant, transcription, speech, image, video, audio, scheduled work, and health checks. Chat works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, Z.ai, MiniMax, Reka, Perplexity, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Voice, image, video, and audio each have their own provider list.
Voice, skills, and automation
Dictation shows live partial transcripts on streaming models, and text-to-speech plays answers back. You can
extend Friday with local skills — a folder with a SKILL.md in it — or with remote HTTP and local
stdio MCP servers. A HEALTH.md checklist can run on an interval and respects whether you're
actually at the machine.
Getting it
v1.0 is a public beta, available for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows, and Linux from the GitHub releases page, in English and Italian, with light, dark, and system themes. Download it, add a key, set your permissions, and start talking to it.
One honest caveat: keys, bot tokens, and MCP secrets sit in local config files rather than an encrypted vault, and Friday makes no regulated-data certification claim. Worth knowing before you point it at anything sensitive.
Try it at friday.haraldbregu.com, and if it's useful, an upvote on Product Hunt helps other people find it.