An AI assistant for your Mac that works in your real apps

A Mac comes with good tools for getting around. Most people use one or two of them and never think about the rest. Before you add anything new, it helps to know what is already there, and where each one stops.

What your Mac can already do

Spotlight

Press Cmd + Space and start typing. Spotlight finds apps, documents, mail and settings, and it looks inside many documents as well as at their names. It is the fastest way to open something you can name.

Siri

Siri answers questions and handles quick requests: open an app, set a timer, add a reminder, send a short message. You turn it on and choose how to start it in System Settings, under Siri (on macOS 11 and 12, System Preferences › Siri).

Shortcuts

On macOS 12 and newer, the Shortcuts app lets you chain steps together and run them with one click or a phrase. It is powerful once it is set up, and setting it up is the part most people never get round to.

Where those tools stop

Each of these works well inside its own lane. Spotlight finds a file but does not move it for you. Siri does a quick request but not a job with several steps across apps. Shortcuts does a job with several steps, but only the ones you built in advance.

The everyday jobs that eat time are usually the ones in between: find the bill from March and put it on the Desktop, sort the Downloads folder into folders, make the text bigger and turn on Night Shift, open the meeting that is in your messages. Each one is a few clicks in a few places, and each one is slightly different every time.

An assistant that uses the Mac the way you do

Key is a free personal assistant that lives on your computer. You speak to it or type to it, in your own words, and it does the job in the real apps: it opens the window, presses the button, moves the file. There is nothing to set up first and nothing to connect.

• Files. It finds files by what is inside them, not just the name, and reads the document to be sure it has the right one. If two files match, it asks which one you meant.
• Settings. "Turn the brightness down." "Switch to dark mode." "Make the text bigger." It changes the setting in the same window you would use.
• Apps. Mail, the browser, documents and the settings, the apps you already use.
• Reminders. Tell it what and when, the way you would tell a friend, and it speaks up when the time comes. When a meeting turns up in your messages, it can put it in your calendar and remind you before it starts.

Half a sentence is enough. This is what a request looks like:

KeyVoice

Find the electricity bill from March and put it on my Desktop

opened Downloadsread 3 PDFs to find the right onemoved bill-march.pdf to Desktop

Found it in Downloads and moved it to your Desktop. It is the March bill, 318 KB.

Checked: read the file back off the disk

It works out what you meant, does it in the real app, then reads the result back before it tells you. When it could not check, it says so instead of pretending it worked.

The rules it keeps on every job

Something that can use your whole Mac has to be clear about what it refuses. Key has four rules built into the program, each with a test behind it:

1. It never deletes for good. Anything it removes goes to the Trash, where you can put it straight back.
2. It stops before paying. It fills a checkout in completely and then waits for your yes, for that one payment, on that one site, once.
3. It never types a password. A login screen is yours. It tells you what is being asked for and goes no further.
4. It never says done blindly. It checks the result first, and a failure comes back as a failure.

While it works it shows a small panel at the top of the screen, so you can see each step and stop it at any point. When you are not using it, it stays out of the way.

Which Macs it runs on

Any Mac with macOS 11 Big Sur or newer, Intel or Apple Silicon. It is one download for both kinds of Mac.

Key is free to download, with no card and no trial, and every feature is in the free version. It also runs on Windows 10 and 11, as the same assistant with the same rules.

Getting started

1. Download Key for Mac from the button below and open it.
2. Sign in when it asks. Key then sits at the top of your screen until you need it.
3. Speak to it, or open the chat and type. Start with something small, like "make the text bigger", and watch what it does.

Want to see how searching inside files works on a Mac by hand first? There is a guide to finding a file by what is inside it.

Related guide: How to search inside files for a word or phrase on Windows

Related guide: How to free up disk space on Windows 11 without deleting what matters

Related guide: How to stop programs from starting when Windows turns on