Lens — a free AI assistant that runs on your own machine

Lens reads your screen when you ask it to, follows what was just said on a call, and answers from documents you give it. The model runs on your own computer through Ollama, so there is no subscription, no account, and nothing is uploaded.

Assistants of this kind are usually rented: a monthly fee, your screen processed on someone else's servers, and a model you cannot choose. Lens is the same idea built the other way round. You host the model, you pick it, and the data stays with you.

What it does

• Answers about your screen. Press ⌘⇧Space and it asks what you want done with the capture instead of guessing.
• Follows conversations. With listening on, it transcribes the call on-device and can answer the last thing the other person said. macOS only.
• Knows your material. Drop in PDFs, Word files, notes or markdown and it retrieves only the relevant passages per question, so a large library still fits a small model's context.
• Remembers across sessions. Chats are kept in a searchable sidebar and it recalls relevant past exchanges.
• Searches the web when you want it to, off by default.
• Recommends a model for your hardware, reading your RAM and VRAM so you do not find out the hard way.

Download

Free for macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel, Windows, and Linux as an AppImage, deb or rpm. The installers are not code-signed yet, so macOS needs right-click then Open, and Windows needs More info then Run anyway.

Does it hide from screen sharing?

No, and that is deliberate. Lens has no anti-detection of any kind and none is planned. It is built to be a tool you use openly, not one you conceal during an interview or exam.

What leaves your computer

Two things, and only when you choose them: a cloud provider if you pick one instead of running locally, and web search when you switch it on. Documents, chat history and learned memory stay in your user data directory. API keys are encrypted with the OS keychain, and transcription runs on-device.

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