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Every Ability on OpenHome falls into one of three categories. Knowing which type you are building determines your architecture, your trigger strategy, and how users experience the feature.

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The four categories

CategoryBehavior
SkillTriggered by a hotword. Runs a flow, exits. The original ability pattern.
Brain SkillThe Personality’s brain decides when to invoke it — data lookups, tool use, delegated actions. No explicit trigger.
Background DaemonStarts automatically when a call begins and runs continuously for the whole session. Used for monitoring, alarms, ambient intelligence.
LocalRuns directly on Raspberry Pi hardware. Under development — not yet released.