Vision¶

More agency for everyday life¶

Unison exists to return time and attention to the people who use it. The system can coordinate administrative work, help people understand complex choices, support learning and creation, and remain useful through changing needs and technology.

Success is measured through useful outcomes, understandable decisions, recoverable actions, and the degree of control each person retains. Personal context stays available across model and service changes so the relationship can develop over years.

One person, one governed assistant¶

Each person is the principal of their Unison assistant. Identity, consent, private memory, interaction preferences, credentials, and personal policy are governed independently. A household can create explicit shared spaces for mutual plans, devices, schedules, and records while preserving each person's private spaces.

This person-level foundation supports trust across health, financial, legal, educational, household, and creative work. Every context space can carry its own purpose, retention, sharing, and security policy.

Intelligence expressed in the right form¶

Unison represents meaning before choosing its expression. The same governed outcome can become a conversation, a visual composition, a structured Braille experience, a tactile signal, or a future modality such as sign language or a brain-computer interface.

Each modality integrates through a common semantic contract. Independent teams can create native experiences while preserving equivalent meaning, choices, uncertainty, confirmation, and recovery.

Explore the multimodal architecture.

A system that keeps finding a path¶

Unison is intent-based computing. Intent captures what a person wants to accomplish together with their current context, needs, preferences, timing, and boundaries. It gives the system a stable human objective while models, tools, devices, and interaction modalities remain flexible.

Reliable skills, tools, and workflows provide consistent routes for familiar work. Governed inference helps resolve novel requests and ambiguous situations. When recurring requests reveal a useful pattern, Unison can prepare a proposed capability for human review. Accepted proposals become versioned, testable, and inspectable building blocks.

This creates a growing local repertoire while preserving natural interaction. The person can begin with intent and let the system assemble an appropriate route from the capabilities available at that moment.

From software platform to household utility¶

The current project is experimental software for capable Ubuntu systems. The longer-term vision is a professionally deployable personal intelligence appliance with modular compute, memory, storage, networking, radios, sensing, security, power, and cooling.

The hardware path includes estimated bills of materials, qualification data, open custom schematics, repair guidance, and a distinct enclosure. Incremental hardware profiles can expand local capability before the integrated appliance is ready.

Unison names the complete assistant platform and experience. UnisonOS names the Linux appliance runtime and operating surface. The personal node is the trusted household system where identity, context, policy, and continuity live.

Open source as a product property¶

Open development makes trust inspectable and participation practical. Public contracts define authority. Evidence labels distinguish unit tests, simulation, hosted CI, physical hardware, and participatory evaluation. Replaceable modules let the project adopt new models, storage systems, modalities, and hardware while a person's identity and accumulated context remain continuous.