Ability Types

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

The four categories

Category	Behavior
Skill	Triggered by a hotword. Runs a flow, exits. The original ability pattern.
Agent Controlled	The Agent decides when to invoke it — data lookups, tool use, delegated actions. No explicit trigger.
Background Daemon	Starts automatically when a call begins and runs continuously for the whole session. Used for monitoring, alarms, ambient intelligence.
Local	Runs as a Local Ability on OpenHome DevKit hardware.

Abilities Background Abilities

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Overview

Core Concepts

The four categories

​The four categories

The four categories