Orby is now part of the Devotel Orbit dashboard. It is an in-product assistant for operators — the people running your workspace day to day — and it lives as a chat panel you can open from anywhere in the dashboard. Ask it a question about your workspace, ask it to orient you in the product, or ask it to do something; Orby answers in the same panel and, when a request would change data, pauses for your explicit approval instead of acting silently.
Why build it in: operator questions like "how many conversations are unassigned right now?" still pull most teams out of their stack — into docs, a chat with support, or four navigational hops. Orby folds the answer, the lookup, and the action into the dashboard itself.
What Orby is
Orby is a chat panel scoped to the signed-in operator. It classifies each message's intent, grounds its reply in your live workspace data and the Orbit product documentation, and renders the response as it streams in. Past conversations stay available as threads in the panel's past-chats view, so a question from yesterday can be resumed rather than re-asked.
Two properties define the surface:
- Operator-facing only. Orby runs in the context of the signed-in dashboard user. There is no server-to-server API-key path: an API-key-authenticated request is rejected, so Orby's surface cannot be scripted or driven by a leaked key.
- Same permissions, not more. Every turn is scoped to your organization, your role, and your own threads. Orby cannot reach anything your role could not reach through the dashboard, and every data-changing action it proposes runs through the same authorisation checks as the equivalent dashboard control.
What it can do
The assistant's actions resolve to a fixed set of capabilities across the product areas, grouped here by the kind of help they provide:
- Usage and billing. Credit balance with the last top-up, recent invoices, paginated ledger history, message-cost previews, and your RCS brand-registration status.
- Operations insights. Daily message/call/conversation volume, first-response times with averages and percentiles, top channels by volume, and period-over-period comparisons.
- Voice. Today's call counts by direction and status, recent call lists, call search by number, and per-call summaries.
- Messaging. A send-SMS action with a cost estimate — held for your approval before it runs — plus contact lookups and audience segment counts and lists.
- Inbox. Unread and active conversation counts, conversation search, per-conversation summaries, and reassignment or snooze actions — again, executed only after your approval.
- Campaigns. Active campaign lists, per-campaign status, recent delivery and click metrics, campaign search, and pause/resume actions behind the same approval step.
- Contacts and numbers. Contact search and lookup, and your number inventory with counts by status and capability plus per-number details.
- AI agents. List your configured agents, get per-agent details, recent sessions and performance summaries, and create a draft agent from a plain-English description (a draft — you review before it goes live).
- Settings and developer surface. Your organization profile, API-key inventory (prefixes and last-four digits only — full keys are never surfaced to the assistant), and webhook endpoint lists.
On the documentation side, Orby answers how-do-I questions over a hybrid search index of the Orbit product docs — and its "where do I configure X" helper maps a question like "where do I set quiet hours?" to the exact settings page. The docs index refreshes on a schedule, and workspace admins can trigger a manual reindex or check its health.
Actions that change data — sending a message, pausing a campaign, reassigning a conversation — never run from the chat alone. Orby opens a confirmation card with a cost estimate where one applies, and the action executes only when you approve it. A reply of "confirm" or "cancel" in chat resolves to the same code path as the card's buttons. Approvals expire five minutes after the gate raised, so a stale prompt can never fire a forgotten action.
Sessions and availability
Sessions. Orby is available to every signed-in dashboard operator, scoped to your organization — there is nothing to connect and no API key to mint. Fair-use limit: sixty assistant turns per operator per minute. To keep the assistant unreachable from server-to-server integrations, API-key callers are deliberately refused; if your automation needs a programmatic surface, use the REST API it was built on instead — Orby protects the operator surface from exactly that class of key misuse.
Availability. Where a prerequisite service is briefly unavailable, Orby degrades honestly instead of failing blind: if its documentation index is reindexing or cold, how-to answers fall back to a cache-first empty-result envelope rather than an error; if a workspace-level data dependency is down at the read layer, the past-chats panel loads an empty list and retries cleanly on the next poll, rather than showing a raw 5xx. Degradation is scoped to the read surfaces — a data-changing action still fails loudly rather than guessing at a degraded state.
Three workflows to try first
- Ask about usage. "What's our credit balance, and how did message volume trend this week versus last?" Orby reads the billing ledger and the daily-volume insight and answers with numbers from your workspace — no report-building step.
- Trigger a supported action. "Pause the winter-promo campaign" or "send an SMS to this contact." Orby opens the confirmation card with a cost estimate for the message case, and executes the pause or send only after you approve — the audit trail records the approval alongside the result.
- Get unstuck without leaving the dashboard. "Where do I configure quiet hours?" returns the settings page that owns the control, with a short answer to the question typed next to it. For new operators onboarding, this turns navigational question-winding into one exchange.
Availability
Orby is live for every Devotel Orbit workspace — all signed-in dashboard operators in all regions, on every plan. There is no per-workspace opt-in and no rollout queue; the assistant ships with the product. Tenant-owned controls are what the surface hands back to you: role-based permissions, the explicit approval step on data-changing actions, and the forty-plus capability set that resolves to your live data. Programmable access stays where it belongs — on the REST API.
- The operator guide is in the docs: Using Orby, the in-dashboard operator assistant.
- The HTTP contract behind the panel is documented in the Orby Assistant API reference.
Frequently asked questions
What is Orby?
Orby is the AI assistant embedded in the Devotel Orbit dashboard. It answers operator questions grounded in your live workspace data and the Orbit documentation, and proposes data-changing actions — such as sending a message or pausing a campaign — for your explicit approval before executing them.
Can I call Orby with an API key?
No. Orby is operator-facing only and rejects API-key-authenticated requests. Programmable access to Orbit's capabilities runs on the REST API; the assistant surface is deliberately session-only so a leaked key cannot drive it.
How do approvals on data-changing actions work?
When a turn implies a change, Orby pauses on a confirmation card with a cost estimate where one applies. The action executes only if you approve — a chat reply of "confirm" or "cancel" resolves the same way as the card buttons — and the approval window expires five minutes after the gate raised.
What happens if Orby or a dependency is briefly unavailable?
Read surfaces degrade gracefully: the past-chats list loads empty and recovers on retry, and documentation answers fall back to a cache-first empty result while the docs index reindexes. Data-changing actions fail loudly rather than guessing at degraded state.