A chat window that lives over every app.
Dollop started as voice dictation. Then it got a model of its own. Today the third pillar lands: an AI chat that opens over whatever you're already working in, listens when you speak, sees what you're looking at if you let it, and stays out of the way the rest of the time.
Hit ⌃ S. The overlay slides up from your dock. Speak, type, or both. Hit esc to dismiss. That's the whole interaction model.
Three modes, one hotkey.
AI Chat figures out what you want from where your cursor is when you press the key:
- Answer: cursor in a text field, no selection. Speak a question; the answer pastes at the cursor as if you typed it. Lowercase question gets a lowercase answer.
- Command: cursor on selected text. Speak an instruction ("make this more polite", "expand", "translate to French"); the rewrite replaces your selection.
- Overlay: no field, no selection. The chat window opens, holds the conversation, and lets you keep going across turns.
Same hotkey, three different surfaces. The right one fires automatically based on what you were doing the moment before.
It can see your screen — only if you ask.
Toggle screen context on, and AI Chat OCRs the active window before it answers. Reading an article and want a one-line gist? Looking at a Stripe error and want to know what it means? Highlight nothing, just speak — the model sees what you see.
The OCR runs on Apple's Vision framework, on-device, in under 200 milliseconds. The recognized text feeds the model's prompt as context, then the prompt and the answer go to the on-device Foundation Model. Nothing leaves your Mac. The toggle is off by default; you flip it on per feature, in Settings.
Why this matters more than another chat app.
The desktop chat-app shape (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) wants you to switch into a tab, paste in what you're working on, ask, copy the answer, switch back. Five steps for a single sentence of help.
AI Chat collapses that to one hotkey. You don't switch contexts. The cursor stays where it was, the selection stays where it was, the answer comes to you. For the kind of micro-asks that happen fifty times a day — fix this sentence, remind me what this function does, summarize what I'm reading — the friction floor matters more than the model's IQ ceiling.
Still 0 GB of RAM.
AI Chat uses the same architecture as the rest of Dollop: ride on the foundation model Apple already keeps warm in the OS, attach the Dollop adapter on top, don't load a separate model into your memory. The chat history lives in a small JSON file in your Application Support folder; the retrieval index lives in a SQLite DB next to it. The app itself contributes nothing on top of the OS baseline.
Most desktop chat apps either ship a 2–8 GB model or bounce every turn through a server. We do neither. Apple FM is already resident; Dollop just talks to it, with our adapter sharpening its answers.
It remembers, but only locally.
Every chat is saved to your Mac, sorted newest-first in the sidebar, named automatically by the model after the first turn ("Tax basis on RSU sale", not "New chat 14"). Open one and continue from where you left off. Search across all of them; the index is local, the embedding model is Apple's NaturalLanguage, and the cosine similarity runs in-process.
Delete a chat and "delete" actually means delete — the file is gone, the embeddings are gone, no copy was ever uploaded. The same goes for the screen-context OCR: nothing is logged, nothing is sent.
How people are using it.
- Engineers: select a regex, hit ⌃ S, "explain this." Or in a terminal: "what's that error mean."
- Writers: select a paragraph, "tighten." Or "make it less salesy." Output replaces the selection.
- Students: screen-aware on, looking at a problem set: "walk me through #4."
- Founders: in Slack, no selection: "draft a polite no to this VC ping." It pastes at the cursor.
- Researchers: reading a paper in the browser, screen-aware on: "summarize the methods."
Dollop is now three things.
Every voice OS we use lives in one app, one tab, one window. Dollop is trying to be the opposite: present everywhere, on every keystroke, but only when you call for it. The full picture, as of today:
- Dictation (⌥ Space): clean text at your cursor in any app.
- AI Chat (⌃ S): a floating overlay, optionally screen-aware, for asking and rewriting.
- Meeting Notes (⌃ R): record any class or call; get a transcript, a summary, and action items.
All three run on-device. All three are free.
Available today, free.
AI Chat ships in Dollop starting today. No upgrade, no tier, no extra purchase. If you already have Dollop installed, update to the latest version and the feature is there. If you don't, the download is free, and the full app is the free app.