Orion is the assistant built into Omniris. Ask it a question in plain English and it answers from your own jobs, files and imagery, and from the Omniris guides. It only reads, and it only sees what you are allowed to see.
Most questions about a drone program have their answer somewhere in the data already: which jobs are waiting on you, how much storage a folder uses, how tall the trees on a site are, where a field is under stress, how hot the hottest spot on a roof was. Finding it usually means knowing which screen to open and which filter to set. Orion lets you just ask.
Orion answers from three places: your own records (jobs, files, invoices, processing runs and more), your own imagery (3D surveys, multispectral flights, thermal flights and maps), and the Omniris guides. It shows its answers as short text, tables, marked-up images and links you can click.
"Which of my jobs have results waiting for review?" Orion looks it up and answers with a list you can click straight into.
Heights from a 3D survey, crop condition on a multispectral flight, temperatures on a thermal flight, and a close look at the photo map.
"Where do I set my units?" Orion answers from the Omniris guides and tells you which button, view or tab to use.
Say "this site" or "this folder". Orion is told what you are looking at, checked against what you are allowed to open.
Orion never creates, changes or deletes anything. It looks things up and explains them.
It sees only what your account may see. Another customer's data is out of its reach, whatever is asked.
Orion is part of the Omniris web app and the Omniris desktop application. It is the same assistant in both, with the same conversations.
The side panel and the full view share the same conversations, so you can start a question in one and carry on in the other. Orion is not part of the phone app, and read-only viewer accounts do not have it.
Ask the way you would ask a colleague. Orion works out which of your records the question is about, looks them up, and answers. It reads the records that belong to your own account.
| Area | What you can ask about |
|---|---|
| Jobs and the marketplace | Your jobs and their status, applications and direct offers, the pilot on a job, results waiting for review, ratings. Pilots can also ask about open marketplace jobs. |
| Money | Invoices and their status, what you are owed or have paid, payout history, credit and plan purchases, your plan and credits. |
| Files and folders | Counts, sizes and types, recent uploads, largest files, which folders hold the most, storage used, tags, share links you have made. |
| Notes on files | Typed notes on your files and the written-out text of voice memos attached to them, so "which photos mention the cracked bracket?" works. |
| Processing runs | Map, 3D model and LiDAR runs and their status; which 3D results exist for a folder; AI detection results and their counts, including which images a person has checked and verified. |
| Equipment and credentials | Your aircraft, sensors and certifications, such as whether your Part 107 is current. |
| People | Your private contacts, the pilots or clients you have worked with, and the public directory (name, company, role and city only). |
| Messages and history | Your conversations, and your own actions in the custody record of your files. |
Each question you send carries a short note of what is on your screen, so "here", "this folder" and "this site" mean what you expect. Orion can be told:
Every item is checked before Orion sees it: a folder, site or image is passed on only if your account may open it. The temperatures of a measured area are worked out again from the thermal map itself, not taken from the screen. Orion is also told what changed since your last question, so after you switch to another site it uses the new one and drops the old.
Map drawings are not saved, so apart from that last thermal area Orion cannot see what you sketched. If you ask about an area it was not shown, it says so and asks you to describe the place or draw it again. It does not substitute a different area.
The question, plus the checked note of what is on your screen.
Orion picks which kinds of record the question is about, and finds the sections of the Omniris guides that match it.
It reads your records, and uses its tools for weather, heights, field conditions, temperatures or a look at the imagery. Every lookup is read-only and limited to what you may see.
Text, tables, images and links appear in the chat as they are written. A line above the answer says what Orion is doing while it works.
The question and answer are saved in your conversation, so you can come back to it, carry on, or export it.
These are what make Orion more than a search box. Each needs the right result to exist first: a finished map and 3D run, a multispectral flight, or a thermal flight. When it does not exist, Orion says so plainly instead of guessing.
"How tall is the tallest thing on this site?" "How high are the trees?"
For one of your finished map and 3D runs, Orion reads two height maps: the surface model (the top of everything: ground, trees, buildings) and the terrain model (the bare ground). The difference is how tall things stand above the ground. Orion reports the tallest point, the typical height (the median) and the average, plus the heights that 75%, 95% and 99% of the area stays under. The 99% figure is a steadier guide to the tallest things than a single highest reading, which one stray measurement can push up. Height differences under about 10 inches (0.25 m) are treated as bare ground in those figures.
The tallest point is the tallest thing on the surveyed area, whatever it is. Orion does not say which object it belongs to. Volumes, areas and distances between objects are not something Orion measures; it lists the right results as links and points you to the 3D viewer and the measuring tools.
"Show me the stressed areas." "Where is there standing water?" "Bare patches." "True stress, not ripening."
Orion makes marked images of the field for each flight: a field view with the matching areas outlined, and a heatmap of the measurement it used. It says how much of the field is affected, in acres (or square feet for small areas) with hectares in parentheses, and where: the largest areas are numbered on the image and described by position, such as "the northwest corner". Up to five areas are numbered; if there are more, Orion says so.
It chooses the measurement (a vegetation index: a number worked out from the light the crop reflects) from your wording:
| You ask about | Index used |
|---|---|
| Stressed, unhealthy, poor vigor | NDVI; NDRE for dense or late-season crops |
| Nitrogen or chlorophyll shortage | NDRE, then CI-RedEdge or MTCI |
| Standing water, ponding, flooding | NDWI (high values) |
| Dry, moisture stress | NDWI (low values), a relative guide to moisture, which Orion says |
| Ripening, dying back | PSRI |
| Bare soil, thin stand | MSAVI2 (or SAVI, OSAVI); NGRDI or GLI on ordinary color flights |
| Healthiest, densest areas | NDVI or NDRE (EVI2 where NDVI tops out) |
Eighteen indices are available in all, and Orion uses only those your flight's camera bands can support. Worth knowing:
"How hot is it?" "What's the hottest spot?" "Any thermal anomalies?" "Is this field short of water?"
Orion reads only the checked temperature map Omniris builds from a thermal flight. From the newest flight, or the date you name, it gives:
Orion never estimates a temperature. Every number comes from the temperature map. If a folder has no thermal data, it says so.
"What's at the hottest spot?" "What is hot spot 3?" "What's in stressed area 2?" "Describe this site."
Orion can open the flight's color map and look. For a spot, it shows a close-up and a wider view with crosshairs on the exact place, and re-frames if the first view was too tight or too wide. For "the hottest spot" or "hot spot 3" it finds the place from the thermal data itself, so nothing can be mistyped. For a whole site, it takes one overview. The views it looked at are shown to you in the chat.
What it says is a visual reading of the photo, not a measurement, and it will not claim to see things only a few pixels across.
"How many cars?" cannot be answered by a glance. Orion answers counts from your AI detection results when a run exists for the folder. Otherwise it tells you a reliable count needs an AI detection run. It may add a rough impression, clearly labelled, but never as the count.
Orion's highlights are images in the chat: the marked field views, heatmaps, thermal maps and close-ups above. Orion does not draw on the live map. It can, however, see what the map is showing (the imagery switched on, the thermal anomalies marked, the area you last measured), so you can ask about them directly.
"Where is the flyability tool?" "How do I create a public share link?" "What does this column in Zonal Analytics mean?"
For every question, Orion searches the Omniris guides for the sections that match, and answers from them with the actual place in the app: which button, which view, which tab. It sees only the guides that apply to you:
| Guide | Who it is searched for |
|---|---|
| The Omniris user guide | Everyone |
| The Zonal Analytics guide | Everyone |
| The Orion guide | Everyone |
| The pilot guide | Pilots |
| The client guide | Clients |
Orion is told never to invent buttons, menus or pages the guides do not describe. If the guides do not cover something, it says it has no documentation on that feature and offers to look at your data instead.
Orion has a fixed set of tools. It decides which to use from your question, and can chain them: find a place, then check the forecast there. While a tool runs, the line above the answer says what it is doing.
| Tool | What it does | Shown while it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Look up your records | Reads your jobs, files, invoices, runs and other records, read-only, and returns at most 200 rows per lookup | Querying your data |
| Flying forecast | A flyability score from 0 to 100 for each day, up to 16 days ahead: the best window to fly, temperature, wind and gusts, chance of rain, cloud, sunrise and sunset, with the days ranked best to worst. Temperatures in °F, wind in mph | Checking weather forecast |
| Current conditions | The newest report from the nearest airport weather station within about 100 miles (165 km): wind, visibility, cloud base, temperature, dew point, pressure and flight category (VFR, MVFR, IFR, LIFR) | Checking current conditions |
| Find a place | Turns a city, address or landmark into a map position for the weather tools. For a job, Orion uses the job's own location | Looking up location |
| Heights from a 3D survey | How tall things stand above the ground on a finished map and 3D run | Reading 3D surface model |
| Highlight field conditions | Marked field images and heatmaps for a vegetation index, with the share of the field affected | Analyzing field imagery |
| Read temperatures | Temperatures, hot spots, severity bands and crop water stress from a thermal flight | Reading thermal data |
| Look at the imagery | Close-ups or an overview of the flight's color map, shown to you in the chat | Looking at the imagery |
Three more things happen around the conversation itself:
An assistant that can read your data must never become a way around your permissions. Orion is built so that it cannot, whatever it is asked.
Orion's record lookups run under a separate database sign-in that can only read. On top of that, every request is checked before it runs: anything that would add, change or delete is refused. Each lookup is also capped at 30 seconds.
That sign-in sees your records through views (filtered windows onto the data) that each contain only rows belonging to you: your jobs, the files in your vault, your invoices, and so on. The filter is applied by the database itself, not by Orion following instructions. If Orion were to reach for someone else's data, the answer would simply be empty. If the database cannot tell who is asking, every view is empty.
| Who | What Orion shows |
|---|---|
| Pilots | Their own jobs and applications, and open marketplace jobs. For invoices, only the pilot's own payout. The client's amounts and the fee are withheld by the database itself, not just by Orion's instructions, as they are on the invoice screens |
| Clients | Their own jobs. For invoices, Orion is instructed to show the invoice total, never what the pilot is paid or the fee |
| Everyone | Their own files, runs, contacts and account; other people only as the public directory shows them: name, company, role and city, never email or phone |
| Viewer accounts | No Orion |
Orion links what it names, so you never have to hunt for it:
Marked field images, heatmaps, thermal maps and close-ups appear in the answer. Click one to enlarge it; it closes with its Close button. Images are kept for 90 days, after which the conversation shows "[image expired]" in their place.
Orion is built to say so rather than fill a gap:
Orion can take several steps for one question, but not without limit. After about two minutes of its own thinking time (time spent reading imagery does not count), it stops looking things up, answers with what it has found, and says plainly which parts it could not finish. If a question would need more than twelve steps, it asks you to make the question more specific. Answers reflect your data at the moment you ask; ask again after an upload or a new run to see the change.
Orion is one of the services Omniris measures each month, alongside map tiles, address lookups and weather. Its use is counted in tokens: the units of text an AI model reads and writes. A longer conversation, or a question that needs several lookups, uses more.
The check happens before each question. If the allowance and cap are already used up, Orion says why (for example, the monthly cap has been reached) and what will fix it. If they run out part-way through a question, Orion stops looking things up, answers with what it already found, says which parts it could not finish, and shows the same message.
On an on-premises installation, Orion is not counted against each person in this way.
Any conversation can be exported from the conversation list or the side panel:
| Choice | What you get |
|---|---|
| Save as HTML | One self-contained web page, with every image inside it |
| Save as PDF | The same document, ready to print or send |
| Save to folder | The PDF filed into a vault folder you choose and can write to, as a normal file with its own custody record. If the folder encrypts what lands in it, the PDF is encrypted too |
The document contains:
Links to jobs, files and people become plain names in the document, since they only work inside the app. Images older than 90 days print as a note that they have expired. Nothing is stored ahead of time: the document is built from the conversation each time you export it, so it always includes the newest answers.
A downloaded file goes wherever you send it. A PDF saved to a folder can be opened by anyone who can open that folder, including clients you have shared it with. Choose the folder with that in mind.
Orion runs on Omniris in the cloud (Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud), in the data center edition, and on-premises. Its AI is an online service in every case, including on-premises: the site needs its internet connection for Orion to answer.
On an on-premises site, Omniris watches that connection. When Orion cannot be reached, it says so instead of failing silently:
Orion's weather and place-finding tools also use online services. If one of those cannot be reached while Orion itself can, Orion is told why, and says that part is unavailable rather than guessing.
An assistant is only as useful as it is honest about what it cannot do.
"What jobs are waiting on me?" "What am I owed?" "Is my Part 107 current?" "Can I fly at the job site on Thursday?" One place, no hunting through screens.
Ask for the stressed or waterlogged parts of a field, see them outlined with acres, compare flight dates, then ask what is in the worst area.
Ask for the hottest spot, get the temperature in °F and °C, a graded temperature rise, and a close-up photo of what is actually there.
"How tall is the tallest thing on this site?" from a finished 3D run, with links to the height maps and 3D model for measuring.
"Which of my jobs have results waiting for review?" "What have I spent this quarter?" Answers with links straight to the job or invoice.
Export the conversation as a PDF with the images Orion made and the context it started from, and file it in the site's folder.
Orion reads the results the rest of Omniris produces. These papers describe them: