Alter - Talk to your Mac and get things done fast with an AI copilot
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Alter is the Mac AI assistant that lets you get stuff done fast. Just talk to extract insights from YouTube videos, draft emails, or extract data. It understands what's on your screen and works across your apps, bringing intelligence to your entire day.
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Functionally strong and has taken a good stab at integrating the AI into the OS in a natural way. Launching files and sites from the UI into the app worked well. It picked up contexts accurately, including when it would be suitable for offering a transcription.
It offers a fair amount of access to LLMs and apparently you can use its API in other apps to allow you to utilise your token limit there, which is very generous.
I couldn’t figure out how to use Claude with it. It says on the main website front page it supports it, but then I found under the FAQ it doesn’t, so not sure.
The notch integration needs a rethink on non-notch devices, it overlaps other UI elements and the chat window drops down weirdly from where the notch should be. A proper centralised quicksilver style UI feels an obvious alternative.
I think that the “Talk to your Mac” is an odd selling point. For people that work in busy spaces, talking to your Mac isn’t attractive, and in truth it’s not necessary for the app. It works great with text input too. It’s a fun addition but making your primary marketing about voice input feels like it’s just going to limit your audience. People who don’t want to chat to their Mac will just assume it’s not for them.
I’d prefer a proper permanent chat window view, to be able to return to interactions from a few days ago, which is useful for things like research. The transactional drop menu is going to be a limiting factor for longer complex tasks.
Not super cheap but the pricing is fair imo.
A solid product. It’s in that second gen of Mac AI products that go beyond simple GPT Chat windows and try and integrate AI into daily workflows. A few quibbles means it’s not my app of choice for now, but I’ll watch the development with interest.
After searching for many months for an AI application for my daily use on Mac, I finally found a gem!
The future of computer relationship with humans: AI first, no friction, full context, vocal ready 🔥
Excellent, well thought through app. It integrates seamlessly into my daily workflow and I find myself using it all the time, even for little searches, then live (follow me) context aware text selection, clipboard and open document assignment and interrogation, idea validation, decision making challenges, tweaking emails and messages (with smart format pasting). I almost never search Google ("Give me the latest research on …") or read web pages (combining my current web page context with web search) anymore, and watching endless YouTube videos to learn something to help me on a project is a thing of the past -all I do now is identify the video of interest ("Show me YouTube videos about …), have Alter tell me what I need to know and where I need to actually watch - this alone saves me hours in a month. Oh, and did I mention dictating instead of typing? You have to learn how to do that - thousands of keystrokes saved each month - keyboards will last years longer.
I locally (auto) record all my meetings and relevant conversations (with the option of a quick "don't record" feature) and have Alter transcribe, automagically identify and add speaker names and summarise the meeting for me. This, building my local knowledge repository for each client. I have Workspaces configured that allows me to quickly set the context for my next project tasks - combine this with Co-Intelligences and hours of work is compressed into minutes.
Ever built a full Keynote presentation (with chosen theme and # slides) from a PDF document? Takes less than 1 minute. No copy pasting.
It really is my go to, even though I have paid subscriptions to Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini - which are each useful for project tasks (but the way Alter is progressing, I see those subscriptions slowly ending). Alter has a 'Best' model feature - I no longer have to figure out which vendor model is best for the task at hand - Alter works that out for me, yet another point of friction in my day elegantly solved. If I want to use a specific model - 1 second model selection and voilà.
Ever configure services and resources in Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure? Who needs to read the documentation anymore (and if you've done that, you'll know what I'm referring to) - I simply open the resource page and ask Alter to tell me how to do the configuration and with my Workspace context set, it even retrieves the PRD/specs/URI's, … from the contextual workspace and tells me what values to enter in each field + explains why and what for. This feature has reversed my age - who needs anti-ageing products?
The Co-Intelligences + Workspaces + Actions (customisable) are a regular go to as I do my daily tasks. The combo's are a force multiplier in improving the quality of my work and the speed at which things get done. With the new Automation feature coming soon (external 3rd party app integrations) … sigh!!!
Apple Intelligence - you missed a trick here while you were napping.
Elegant and thoughtful; both design and functionality. It's funny seeing others do better than Apple does on with their own products
Impressed by the product/usage consistency.
The voice interface + system-wide integration = a seamless UX, with zero cognitive friction.
Alter checks a rare box: AI genuinely embedded into the professional workflow, not just bolted onto existing tools.
Strategic question: what's your long-term vision on the B2B side?
Enterprise stack integration?
SDK/API?
Kudos to the team for what I’d call “active-context AI.” Looking forward to what’s next.