The Assistant
Asking Outbound about your network in plain language, and how the answers stay honest.
The Assistant is a chat pane in the main window. You ask about your network in plain language, it answers from the records Outbound has already collected, with supporting records shown when available. Open “Assistant” in the sidebar. While the pane is open, use “New Chat” (⇧⌘N) to start a conversation.
Asking a question
Section titled “Asking a question”Type into the field at the bottom, placeholder “Ask anything about this Mac’s network”, and press Return. While an answer is being written the button reads “Stop answering (Esc)”; press Escape to stop, and the half-written turn is marked “Stopped”.
When the field is empty, “Dictate a question” lets you speak the question instead. Press it and the label reads “Listening…”; press again to stop dictating. On macOS 26, dictation uses Apple’s on-device model and may download a missing language model before listening. On macOS 14 and 15 it uses the system speech recogniser, requesting on-device recognition when supported. Outbound does not require local recognition when that support is unavailable, so do not assume speech stays on the Mac on those versions. If the microphone is not allowed, Outbound says so: “Allow Outbound to use the microphone in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Microphone.”
For questions that need a model, the input limit is 1,600 UTF-8 bytes on the on-device model or 8,000 UTF-8 bytes with a coding agent. A character can use more than one byte. Inputs over the limit are refused with “Please shorten the question so it fits the on-device model’s context.”
Suggested questions
Section titled “Suggested questions”With no conversation open, the pane shows a welcome (“Ask about your network”) and five suggestion cards:
- “Which apps used the most data today?”
- “Which apps opened the most connections today?”
- “What did Outbound block in the last hour?”
- “Which new servers did apps reach today?”
- “Which countries did apps connect to today?”
A sixth suggestion, “Why was (a site) blocked?”, can appear when today’s blocked records include a suitable domain. Recognised suggestions are answered directly from the records without a model. The wording understands the time range: ask “this week” or “in the last hour” and the ranking answers for that window.
While the answer is being written
Section titled “While the answer is being written”The working turn shows what it is doing:
- “Reading this Mac’s records…”
- “Writing the answer…”
- “Checking 12 figures against the records…” (the count is real)
- “Correcting a figure…”
Draft answers are withheld while Outbound checks their figures. These checks can reject an answer or trigger one correction attempt; they do not establish that every statement is true.
The answer
Section titled “The answer”The question sits in a bubble on the right, as in Messages. The answer appears on the left, beside Outbound’s mark, with the Markdown applied: bold, italics and bullets. Links in an answer are removed before display, so nothing in it is clickable.
Under the text come the records the answer rests on:
- Highlights: up to three records the model pointed out, each with a short note, listed with an accent bar.
- A chart or map: a timeline when the records are a series over time, a ranked bar chart when there is something to compare, or a map when the records name countries.
- Cards: cards for records other than timeline points, with their names and available figures. Clicking opens a matching app, destination or rule in the inspector when it can be resolved. More than six cards and the list folds, with “Show All 12” and “Show Fewer”.
- A source line: “From 5 records on this Mac”.
- Who answered: each answer names the model or agent that wrote it, for example “Answered by Claude Code”, or “Answered by Outbound records” when Outbound answered from its records without a model. A conversation saved by an earlier version may show “Backend not recorded”.
Hovering an answer reveals its time and two actions: “Copy answer” and “Ask again”, which re-asks the question behind it. Below the answer, a row of up to four follow-up suggestions continues the conversation: questions about what the answer just showed, then the starters you have not asked yet.
Answers about countries can show a map of the places your apps reached.
If an answer fails validation after a correction attempt, Outbound falls back to a records-based answer or shows an error with any records it retrieved. One message is “Sorry, I couldn’t answer that reliably. Try asking about apps, sites, countries or blocks on this Mac.”
Answered by a coding agent
Section titled “Answered by a coding agent”If you choose one of your coding agents in Settings › Intelligence, that agent answers instead, running on your own subscription with no API key. It reads your figures through Outbound’s MCP tools, and checks figures against a record of what those tools returned. The welcome line changes to say who is answering, and the availability line reads “Answered by Claude Code” with a “Change…” button. Each prompt sent to the agent has a 600-second timeout. A correction attempt can send another prompt, so this is not a total conversation-turn limit. If the agent quits while answering, its last message stays in the conversation, for example a request to sign in again.
Conversation history
Section titled “Conversation history”A list of past conversations sits beside the chat, newest first, each row showing its title and when it was last used: the time today, then “Yesterday”, the weekday within a week, then the date. The toolbar’s “New Chat” button (⇧⌘N) starts a fresh conversation; “Hide History” and “Show History” fold the list away. The plus menu beside the input also offers “New Chat” and, when history is available, “Show or Hide Conversations”.
At the top of the list, a search field (“Search conversations”) matches every typed word against titles and message text, in any order. Right-click a row for “Rename…” (which opens a “Rename Conversation” dialog) or “Delete”. Deleting keeps the transcript until the Edit › Undo can no longer bring it back.
Conversation history is stored locally in your Application Support folder, with CloudKit syncing disabled. An agent session can receive a summary of earlier conversation turns. Deleting a local conversation does not retract content already sent to an agent.