Orca Chat · The assistant itself · Mac and Windows
Ask it anything. It already has your week open.
Orca Chat is the assistant the rest of Orca is built around. It can see your mail, calendar, Teams, meeting transcripts, people, tasks and files, and it acts through more than a hundred tools: list, search, look up, draft, book, write. You watch every tool it calls. Anything it wants to send lands as a draft for you to approve. And it runs on Claude, on a key that is yours.
Orca Chat is the Chat tab inside Orca, included in the licence. Sonnet is the default model and you can change it in Settings. Model usage is covered by the licence, with a fair-use ceiling.
Ask in plain words. Watch it work. Say yes.
The chat is where you talk to Orca directly. Everything else in the app is Orca doing this on a schedule.
Ask in plain words
"What's on my calendar today?" "Check my recent emails." "Show me my open tasks." Or something that takes six tools to answer. Type it, paste it, or dictate it with the microphone.
Watch it work
Every tool call is shown while it runs and listed when it is done, with the input and the result a click away. If it needs more than twenty-five rounds it stops and asks you to say continue.
Approve what goes out
Emails, Teams messages, calendar invites and tasks are written as drafts and queued. You read it, you send it, or you bin it. Drafts that sit for a day expire on their own.
Attachments
Drop the PDF in. It reads the PDF.
Attach with the button, drag a file in, or paste a screenshot. Images are seen as images. PDFs up to ten megabytes go to the model as documents, so it reads the actual pages rather than a scrape of them. Word, Excel and the rest are converted to text first. Plain text, markdown, CSV and JSON go in as they are.
- The contract, the deck, the invoice. "What does clause 9 commit us to?" "Which of these line items is new?" Ask the document the question.
- Screenshots count. Paste an error, a chart, a Teams thread somebody screenshotted, and ask what it says.
- Attachments are for this conversation. They are not kept in the saved chat after a restart. What you want to keep goes in Notes.
The tools
It doesn't guess. It goes and looks.
A chat assistant that only has your question is a search engine with manners. Orca Chat has your systems. Ask what you discussed with someone last month and it searches the transcripts by participant. Ask whether Thursday is free and it reads the calendar, every account you have connected. Ask for the train and it checks the live departures.
The first turn always reaches for a tool, which is the point: an answer about your week should come from your week, not from the model's general knowledge of what weeks are like.
And every call is on the record. "Actions taken: 3", expand it, and there is the input and the result for each one. Nothing happens off-screen.
It can do a lot. So it asks first.
An assistant with your inbox and your calendar is only useful if you trust what it does when you are not looking. These are the rules.
Drafts first
Orca is told, every time, to draft before it sends. Emails, Teams messages, invites and tasks go into the queue as pending, and the queue is where you say yes. In the chat, in the Drafts view, or on your phone.
Shown, not hidden
Every tool call appears in the conversation as it happens, and stays there. If you want to know why it answered the way it did, the evidence is one click down.
Your key, your account
The app talks to Claude directly with the key in your Settings: the workspace key we set up with your licence, or one you already hold. Your conversations are between your machine and your Claude account, with nothing of ours in the middle.
How it fits
Chat is the assistant. These are what it reads from and writes to.
Orca Chat is a part of Orca. Everything below is the same assistant working through a different door.
Pricing
Included in the Orca licence.
£250/licence/month
Everything included, Claude usage too
- No separate purchase
- Claude usage included, with a fair-use ceiling
- No separate Anthropic account to manage
One licence, the whole assistant
This page is one part of it. Every part below comes with the same licence.
- Orca Inbox
- Orca Autopilot
- Orca Calendar
- Orca Book
- Orca Meet
- Orca Post
- Orca Brief
- Orca Notes
- Orca People
- Orca Chat You are here
- Orca Plan
- Orca Clip
- Orca Mobile
- Orca Today
- Orca Screen recording storage
Claude API usage, setup support and updates are in the monthly price. The pricing page has the one-off setup fee and the rate for six licences or more.
Also available: Orca Time, £2.79 per seat a month, with Orca Snap included.
Questions: chris@simmance.ai.
The questions people ask first.
Which model is it?
Claude Sonnet by default, with the model shown in the chat input. Change it in Settings. Lighter jobs elsewhere in Orca, like the overnight inbox triage, use a smaller model to keep things quick.
Can it send an email without me?
It is told to draft first, every time, and the drafts queue is where sending happens. Approve from the chat, from the Drafts view, or from your phone. Drafts nobody touches expire after a day.
Does it read my whole mailbox every time?
No. It calls the tool it needs for the question you asked: a search, a list of recent mail, one thread. You can see exactly which, in the actions list under each answer.
Can I talk to it instead of typing?
Yes. The microphone button dictates through Deepgram. It appears once a Deepgram key is in place.
What are skills?
Skill files from your own Claude workspace, the same ones you might use in Claude itself. Turn on up to eight in Settings and the chat carries them into every conversation.
Ask the one that knows your week.
Orca Chat is part of Orca · Mac and Windows | Also see Orca Notes, Orca Inbox and Orca People