Productivity

sideOS: A Local AI Assistant That Lives in Your Mac’s Notch

sideOS is a local AI assistant for Mac that lives in the notch: speak, and it reads your screen, clicks, types and reports back.…

sideOS launched on Product Hunt on October 24, 2026: a local AI assistant that lives in the notch of your MacBook. Hold Control and Option, say what you want, and it reads your screen through the accessibility tree in about 50 milliseconds, then opens apps, clicks, types and reports the result out loud. It does not just answer. It acts.

Image: sideOS.

What sideOS does

Talk to it: hold Control and Option, speak, and let go. It reads the screen, drives your apps, and tells you the result. You can also draw on the screen while you talk to point at a specific region.
Dictation: hold Control and fn, and what you say lands at your cursor in any app. It runs on macOS speech engines, costs nothing, and never reaches a cloud model. It covers 62 languages on the classic engine.
Background tasks: hand it long jobs such as research and reports. They run in their own loop while you carry on, and it notifies you when done.
Meetings: it notices when a call window opens and offers one-tap recording. Transcription runs on-device with Whisper, then it writes a summary, splits speakers, and turns action items into reminders.
Reminders: set them by voice, and some finish the work before they ring, such as a morning news digest.
Connections: Gmail, Calendar, Notion, Slack and GitHub join the built-in tools, plus any MCP server. Secrets go to the Keychain.
Activity history: opt-in only. Switch it on and it can answer questions about your own past, from an on-device log.

Your choice of model

sideOS works with Claude, OpenAI, Gemini or Grok using your own API key, which stays in the Keychain. Or point it at a local MLX model, such as Gemma, Mistral, Llama or Qwen, and not a single byte leaves your Mac. There is no account to sign into and no server of theirs between you and the model.

Who it is for

sideOS targets Mac users who want a voice-driven assistant with real hands: people who would rather say “reply to that and put it on my calendar” than do it by hand, and who prefer their screen data, recordings and memory to stay on their own machine.

Pricing

$89.90 once for a lifetime licence: one payment, one Mac, every future update, no subscription and no expiry, and you can move the licence to a new machine whenever you like. The only other cost is the model you point it at, paid to that provider directly, roughly 2 to 5 cents per command on the default models, or nothing at all if you run a local model. Dictation is included at no extra cost. Pricing may change, so check sideos.ai for current terms.

Requirements

sideOS needs an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later. A notch is not required: on displays without one, the same island opens from the top centre of the screen.