I built Halo, a private AI assistant for your Mac (free)
Details
- External ID
- 48767885
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built Halo, a private AI assistant for your Mac (free)
- Website domain
- heyhalo.app
- Launched
- July 2, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.2873357228195938
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai agent infrastructure and tooling
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- private ai assistant for mac
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A basic macOS menu/notch UI with local LLM bindings via llama.cpp or Ollama is achievable, but real-time system audio transcription, proactive screen contextual recall, and low-latency notch integrations require native Apple Silicon and macOS API engineering.
What it would actually take: The app requires Swift/SwiftUI with native AppKit hooks for custom borderless floating NSWindows over the notch area. The local AI pipeline requires Apple's Metal Performance Shaders (MPSGraph) or CoreML/MLX running quantized local models, ScreenCaptureKit for contextual optical capture, and low-level CoreAudio taps feeding whisper.cpp for real-time meeting transcription without audio loopback lag.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 705 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #501 of 706 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 246 days after the earliest competitor.
- Vehla · hn · 2026-09-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- Context-Aware AI Assistant for macOS [Open Source] · hn · 2026-01-16 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Dream Server · hn · 2026-06-15 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Apfel · hn · 2026-04-03 · 743 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- cli-tools · github · 2026-09-09 · 32 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Cook · hn · 2026-03-05 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Apfel · hn · 2026-03-24 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- PlugClaw · hn · 2026-08-19 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.48
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.