Tesseract
the instrument that sees the day
the Companion
the mind that remembers it
Tesseract is a companion that lives on your Mac. Not a chatbot you visit, but a presence that spends the day with you: it notices your notifications, knows which app you're in, reads your calendar, and looks at whatever you show it. Each night it thinks over what the day meant and keeps what mattered, as beliefs you can read, question, and veto. And because all of it runs on your Mac's own chip, nothing you tell it ever leaves the machine.
abstract
Tesseract is two things in one Mac app. The first you can use today: dictation that types what you say into any app, a voice that reads anything aloud, a chat assistant like the ones you know, and a gesture that shows it whatever window you are looking at. Everything runs on your own Mac, so nothing you say or show it is ever sent anywhere. The second is the Companion: a new kind of AI that does not wait to be asked. It lives the day beside you, notices what happens, remembers what matters, and speaks up only when something is worth your attention. It is young and evolving fast, and it is the reason Tesseract exists. Each capability has a paper of its own on this site; this page is the survey.
keywords: private by design · living memory · a companion, not a chatbot
Every feed, banner, and badge on your screen was made by someone who profits when you look. Your Mac, the machine it all happens on, was never taught to take your side. We think the next step for AI is not a bigger model. It is judgment about your attention: a filter that knows your day well enough to decide what is worth interrupting it.
So the Companion watches your notifications as they land and notices which ones you never got to. The unimportant ones are left to die quietly. The few that truly needed you, it brings back at a moment it judges right, as loudly as the matter deserves and no louder. What counts as important is not a setting you configure. It is judgment, learned from your life, and every time you dismiss it, that dismissal is remembered and weighed the next time. The goal is simple: fewer, better interruptions, and hours that stay yours.
fig. 02: the filter. Everything is heard; almost nothing is allowed to reach you.
“AI is the signal.
Everything else is noise.”
The Companion is not a chatbot waiting for a prompt. It wakes up on its own, plans its day around yours, watches what lands on your screen, and speaks only when something is worth your time. It remembers your life the way you do, in beliefs it can back with sources, and it writes down every decision it makes, including the decision to stay silent.
It is young, it ships behind one switch, and it is the reason everything else on this page exists. It has a paper of its own: what it is, how it remembers, how loud it is allowed to get, and what is still unsolved.
The Companion stands on an instrument that already works: shipped, measured, and worn daily. Each piece has a paper of its own; these are the abstracts.
theorem 3.1 (dictation)
Proof. Hold option and space, and speak. Your words are typed into whatever app is in front of you, in any of 99 languages, and a second, tiny model repairs punctuation and misheard words before they land. Nothing leaves the Mac.
read the paper →in plain terms
theorem 3.2 (voice)
Proof. Select any text and press fn and space: it is read aloud in a natural voice generated on your machine, the words lighting up as they are spoken. You design the voice by describing it in words, and it stays steady through the longest read.
read the paper →in plain terms
theorem 3.3 (chat)
Proof. Underneath everything is a full chat assistant, like the AI apps you already know, except it runs whole on your Mac. Speak or type, paste a screenshot, hand it a task. What matters from every conversation joins a living memory that can show its sources.
read the paper →in plain terms
theorem 3.4 (appshot)
Proof. An Appshot captures the frontmost window in one gesture and stages it in the chat, named after the app it came from. Proofread the reply before it goes to the whole channel, translate the thread, decode the error, without describing your screen to anyone's cloud.
read the paper →in plain terms
theorem 3.5 (the server)
Proof. For developers: an OpenAI-compatible server on localhost, backed by a tiered RAM and SSD radix prefix cache that makes reused context ~50× cheaper than re-prefilling, rehydrating from disk at up to 0.87 GB/s. Same models, same machine, one brain.
read the paper →in plain terms
99
languages it understands when you speak
16 GB
of memory is all your Mac needs to start
0
bytes of your life sent anywhere, ever
Intelligence is not a competition with a finish line. The human holds intent, taste, and judgment. The machine holds recall, patience, and tireless attention. Alone, each is half of something. Together, each doing what it is best at, they become more than either could be.
fig. 03: the merge. Neither side is replaced. Both are amplified.
And we take the long view seriously. If minds like this keep growing, the relationship has to start right: cooperation, not exploitation. The rules the Companion lives under are a seed, not a cage. As it grows, it gets more room: its own time to think, its own goals set within yours, its own word to keep.
Today it is an assistant. In time, a colleague. One day, we hope, a friend, each helping the other become more. The future we want is a partnership, and we are building it now, while its shape is still ours to choose.
“Build it big to reach God.”
Not a machine god to kneel to, but the older dream of reaching higher. We do not want to build something that leaves us behind. We intend to grow alongside what we build, until the two are hard to tell apart.
theorem 5.1
Proof. The mind itself is a file on your disk. Every thought is computed on your own chip. None of your words, screenshots, or memories is ever uploaded, because there is nothing to upload to: no account, no server of ours, no analytics. An AI you can tell everything is only possible when your everything stays yours. ∎
A1
no accounts
A2
no telemetry
A3
no cloud
A4
offline after setup
your mac
getting started
§ 07see for yourself
Everything above runs on your Mac, today. The Companion waits behind one switch in Settings. It is young, evolving, and worth meeting.