Alter

About Alter

Alter is a macOS assistant built on the premise that the fastest way to use a Mac is not to touch the keyboard. It combines screen context with voice commands so an instruction can refer to what is actually in front of you rather than to text you have to paste in first — you speak, it sees the same window you do, and it executes. That combination is what separates it from a chat app in a browser tab, and the company's own framing is that its users have escaped ChatGPT rather than supplemented it. A meetings product sits alongside the core assistant, handling recording and note-taking. The economics are the most notable part. The core product is free permanently and stays free: you connect your own provider keys — OpenAI, Anthropic and others — or run local models, with no credit card involved, and every feature is unlocked. The optional paid extras are unusually granular rather than a single subscription wall: a yearly Local+ add-on for real-time local speech-to-text via Whisper Pro and Parakeet V3, which is the privacy-preserving path for dictation and meeting capture across up to three devices; a non-expiring credit refill for using the vendor's own providers; and a Pro subscription. The first seven days include unlimited access to fifty-plus models.

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