Architecture overview¶
Replaceable parts, durable personal authority
Unison organizes services around intent
The architecture separates identity, policy, context, orchestration, capabilities, inference, actuation, and experience so each can evolve without transferring another service's authority.
A governed path through the system¶
- Observe intentA local or remote modality service contributes speech, text, touch, Braille, imagery, device events, or another qualified signal.
- Resolve person and purposeIdentity, assurance, consent, policy, and context services establish the authority and information available for the work.
- Plan the routeThe orchestrator selects deterministic workflows and composes governed inference for novel portions of the request.
- Use capabilitiesTools, connectors, skills, and agents receive scoped grants and return structured results with provenance and side-effect state.
- Validate consequenceResponsible policy and actuation services evaluate recipients, disclosure, risk, confirmation, and recovery.
- Compose the experienceA semantic outcome becomes a native conversational, visual, Braille, tactile, or future-modality expression.
Responsibilities stay with their owners¶
| Responsibility | Primary architectural role |
|---|---|
| Identity and assurance | Auth and channel identity services establish who is present and the strength of that claim. |
| Consent and policy | Trust services decide which purpose, context, disclosure, recipient, and action are authorized. |
| Context and memory | Context and storage services retain governed sources, relationships, derived views, receipts, and lifecycle policy. |
| Orchestration | Intent and orchestration services maintain the human objective, plan work, and reconcile capability and model results. |
| Capability execution | Capability services discover and run declared tools, skills, connectors, and agent peers through scoped grants. |
| Model execution | Inference services route eligible local or remote models and return untrusted, provenance-bearing proposals. |
| Physical or digital action | Actuation services execute validated action envelopes and report exact side effects and recovery state. |
| Native expression | Modality services and Unison Surface compose semantic outcomes and return proposed person responses. |
No model, renderer, adapter, tool, or external content becomes an authority for identity, consent, policy, recipients, incident state, disclosure, or actuation.
Data remains governed through its lifecycle¶
Postgres provides durable service state in current profiles. Redis supports low-latency coordination and caching. Graph services can use Neo4j or supported persistence alternatives. Source artifacts and generated files pass through the storage service. Platform profiles can use NATS and JetStream for durable event streaming.
Authoritative records remain distinct from replaceable indexes, embeddings, summaries, caches, and graph edges. Context-space policy determines retention, sharing, disclosure, backup, export, deletion, and the derived views eligible for rebuilding.
Profiles support different development and deployment needs¶
The development stack uses Docker Compose to connect service repositories and support focused integration work. Platform and infrastructure repositories define appliance topology, release profiles, observability, updates, backup, and recovery. A profile can combine services into fewer containers while preserving their responsibilities and contracts.
Local operation is preferred when the available hardware and policy support the intent. Authorized external models, providers, channels, research routes, and encrypted backup can participate through explicit grants and disclosure decisions.