Skills

Everything Ari can do — beyond the basics — is a skill. Weather, timers, reminders, smart home control, music, navigation, and more all arrive as skills you install, rather than things baked permanently into the app.

Where skills come from

Skills live in an open, signed registry. You can browse and install them two ways:

• In the app, via Settings → Skills.
• On the web, at heyari.dev/skills — handy for browsing from a laptop before installing on your phone.

Every skill in the registry is signed, so what you install is what the author published.

On-device or uses-network

Each skill is labelled either on-device or uses-network, and that label is shown before you install it — no surprises. Some skills, like a simple timer, never need to leave your phone. Others genuinely need the internet to do their job: a weather skill has to ask a weather service, and a smart home skill has to talk to your smart home hub.

Assistants

Assistants are a special kind of skill: a "brain" for open-ended questions that don't match anything else Ari knows how to do. There's a built-in on-device assistant, and if you want more, you can add a cloud one — ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — using your own API key. Adding a cloud assistant is entirely optional.

Skill settings

Some skills have their own settings — units for a weather skill, for instance. These live per-skill, and you'll find them after the skill is installed.

See also: privacy & your data for how the on-device/ uses-network split fits into Ari's wider privacy story.