Friday

A macOS desktop companion with an animated face, voice, and personality — powered by aidaemon.

Friday lives in your menu bar as a small animated critter. Click it for a quick chat popover, or press ⌘⇧Space to summon a full-screen AI companion with a geometric face that reacts to your conversation.

Features

• Menu bar critter — animated character that reflects the AI's current mood
• Quick chat popover — click the critter for fast text-based conversations
• Full-screen face overlay — geometric face with 8 mood states (calm, happy, curious, thinking, alert, concerned, excited, tired)
• Voice input — speak naturally using on-device speech recognition (Apple SFSpeechRecognizer)
• Voice output — responses spoken aloud with synchronized mouth animation
• Interrupt detection — say "stop" or "Friday stop" to interrupt speech mid-sentence
• Mood engine — 2-layer mood derivation from conversation sentiment and system health
• Idle detection — appears when you've been away, greets you when you return
• Global hotkey — ⌘⇧Space to toggle the overlay from anywhere

Requirements

• macOS 14.0+ (Sonoma or later)
• aidaemon running on localhost:8420
• (Optional) Microphone access for voice input

Install

git clone https://github.com/Ask149/friday.git
cd friday
scripts/bundle.sh
open build/Friday.app

That's it. Friday connects to aidaemon automatically.

First time? Make sure aidaemon is running first. Friday will show a connection error in the popover if it can't reach the daemon.

How It Works

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Menu Bar          Popover          Overlay      │
│  ┌──────┐     ┌─────────────┐   ┌────────────┐ │
│  │Crit- │────▶│  Quick Chat │   │ Full-Screen │ │
│  │ter   │     │  (text)     │   │ Face + Voice│ │
│  └──────┘     └──────┬──────┘   └──────┬─────┘ │
│                      │                  │        │
│               ┌──────▼──────────────────▼──────┐ │
│               │     AidaemonClient             │ │
│               │  HTTP REST + SSE Streaming     │ │
│               └──────────────┬─────────────────┘ │
└──────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┘
                               │
                        localhost:8420
                               │
                     ┌─────────▼─────────┐
                     │     aidaemon      │
                     │  (AI daemon)      │
                     └───────────────────┘

Mood States

Mood	When	Face
Calm	Default / normal conversation	Neutral expression, steady eyes
Happy	Positive response, good news	Upturned mouth, bright eyes
Curious	Questions, exploring topics	Wide eyes, tilted expression
Thinking	Processing, tool calls in progress	Narrowed eyes, subtle animation
Alert	System warnings, stale heartbeat	Sharp expression, attention markers
Concerned	Errors, aidaemon unreachable	Worried expression
Excited	Great news, celebrations	Wide smile, animated
Tired	Late hours, low activity	Droopy eyes, slower animation

Configuration

Friday loads optional configuration from ~/.config/friday/config.json. All fields are optional — sensible defaults are used when the file is absent.

See CONFIGURATION.md for all options.

Quick example:

{
  "userName": "Alex",
  "locale": "en-US",
  "voiceIdentifier": "com.apple.voice.premium.en-US.Zoe",
  "activeHoursStart": 9,
  "activeHoursEnd": 23
}

Building from Source

# Build and bundle (creates Friday.app in build/)
scripts/bundle.sh

# Or build without bundling
swift build

# Run tests
swift test

Build Requirements

• Xcode 15+ or Swift 5.9+ toolchain
• macOS 14.0+ SDK
• No external dependencies — uses only Apple frameworks

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development guidelines.

License

MIT