Talk to Buddy while your work stays on screen

You are in the middle of something, and the thing you need is already right there on the screen.

An email needs a reply. A sentence in a doc does not make sense. A meeting just created three follow-ups. A terminal is yelling at you with an error that looks important but not helpful. None of this should require opening a new tab, pasting context, and explaining what you were already looking at.

That extra translation is the tax. You stop working, describe the work, wait for an answer, then carry the answer back to the place you started.

That still feels like work.

Aura is built for the moment before you leave the flow. Press Ctrl twice, talk to Buddy, and ask about the thing in front of you. Buddy can use your screen as context, help with the small jobs that pile up, and remember what matters so you do not keep starting from zero.

The goal is not another chatbot you visit when the real work stops. It is a companion that is close enough to ask while the work is still on screen.

Hit Ctrl twice. Say what you need. Buddy is there.

Stop translating your screen into a prompt

Most desktop AI tools still begin with a blank chat box.

You type a question. You paste an email. You explain who the person is, what you’re working on, and what kind of response you want. By the time the AI understands the situation, you’ve already done half the job yourself.

Buddy is built around a different idea: the assistant should meet you where the work is happening.

With your permission, Buddy can look at what’s on your screen and use it as context. You can ask it to help draft a response to the email you’re reading, explain something in a document, find information without breaking your flow, or save something for later.

You don’t need to write a perfect prompt. You literally just talk.

“Draft a friendly reply to this.”

“Save this so I can come back to it later.”

“What does this mean? What do I do next?”

“Surf this site and walk me through this scenario.”

“Remind me to follow up with them next week.”

That’s the interaction we wanted. Less operating software. More asking for help in real time.

Say the thought before you lose it

People don’t naturally think in prompts. They think out loud.

When you’re trying to get through a busy day, you don’t want to stop and write a carefully structured request. You want to say, “Can you handle this?” and keep moving.

That’s why Aura Desktop opens with one hotkey and starts with a real conversation. It’s not text with a voice button bolted on afterward. Voice is the main way in. Buddy listens, responds in real time, and helps with the small things that quietly pile up during the day.

Talk instead of typing into any Windows app

Before you need a full conversation, there is the smaller thing you do all day: putting words into a box. A Slack reply. A commit message. A search field. A ticket description.

Hold Ctrl and Windows, say the sentence, let go. Aura types the words into the app that was already focused. Not into our app. Not onto your clipboard. Into the field you were about to type in.

We keep that mode separate from screen-aware help on purpose. No overlay opens. No conversation starts. It only listens for the words you are dictating.

The small decisions matter here:

• Your clipboard stays alone. Plenty of dictation tools paste the final text, which wipes out whatever you had copied. Aura sends the characters directly instead.
• It checks the landing zone first. If focus is sitting on a list instead of a text box, a sentence can turn into a burst of accidental shortcuts. Aura asks Windows whether the target is really a text field and refuses to type if it is not.
• Your words should come out right. Client names, product names, internal jargon, and acronyms are fed into recognition up front. Repeated corrections become permanent once you confirm them enough times. That vocabulary is encrypted on your machine with AES-256-GCM under a key tied to your Windows account.
• The dictation text is not logged. No transcript, no partial result, no correction, at any log level. Crash reports coming out of that module are dropped before they leave the machine.

One honest limitation: voice typing needs the internet and a signed-in account. We shipped an on-device version first, but the accuracy did not justify adding 650MB to the installer. Signed out or offline, Aura says so and types nothing rather than quietly producing garbage.

Ask about whatever is in front of you

Buddy isn’t a one-trick tool. Because it can see the screen you’ve chosen to share, you can point at almost anything and just ask.

Stuck on a UI bug? Talk it through and it guides you down to the fix. Reading a dense contract or a pull request? Ask what it would do about it. Learning something new? Ask it to break the idea down like you’re five. It’s less “run this command” and more the way you’d ask a smart colleague sitting next to you.

Drafting is one of the things it’s best at. Reading a cold email and need a reply? It writes one that fits the thread in front of you. When it’s close but not quite right, you nudge it: make it warmer, make it shorter, cut the last line, until it sounds like you. And when you want something more concrete than prose, ask for a command, a snippet of code, a config block, or a checklist, and it hands back something you can actually use instead of a wall of text you have to untangle.

Meeting notes, without babysitting a recorder

A lot of the day disappears into calls, and the useful parts always seem to slip away the moment they end.

When you arm it, Aura Desktop listens to a meeting and turns it into a clean note afterward: a summary, the decisions that were made, the action items, and the open questions still hanging. It only runs when you choose to turn it on, and a visible recording indicator stays up the whole time it is listening. You walk out of the call with the note already written instead of a recording you’ll never replay.

Audio is buffered locally and encrypted on disk so a dropped wifi connection mid-call doesn’t cost you the meeting. That local audio is deleted automatically after seven days. The note stays.

An assistant should remember the work, not just answer the question

A useful desktop assistant can’t treat every conversation like the first one.

Aura is built to remember what matters. When you tell Buddy to save something, it sticks around, and it’s there the next time you need it. Ask it to set a reminder or a follow-up out of something you’re reading, and it becomes a real thing you’ll be nudged about later, not a note you lose in another tab.

The goal isn’t just to generate a good reply in one moment. It’s to become more useful over time because it understands what you’ve been working on. That’s the difference between a chatbot and an assistant worth keeping around.

A normal day, with less app juggling

Abstract descriptions of assistants all sound the same, so here are four real shapes this takes, by the kind of work you do.

Support and customer success

A frustrated ticket is open in front of you and you already know roughly what to say. Instead of writing it, you say “draft a reply that owns the delay and offers Thursday”. Buddy reads the thread that’s on screen and gives you a reply that matches its tone and history, not a generic apology template. You trim a line and send. The whole loop is under a minute, and you never left the ticket.

Product and program management

You arm Aura before a call. Forty minutes later the meeting ends and the note is already written: what was decided, who owns what, and which questions are still open. Nobody had to volunteer as the scribe, and you didn’t spend the call typing instead of listening. The decisions that would normally evaporate are the ones you keep.

Engineering

A build is failing with the kind of error that is four levels of stack trace away from the actual cause. You ask “what is this actually complaining about, and give me the command to fix it” while looking straight at the terminal. You get an explanation of the real cause and a command you can run, without pasting a log into a browser tab and losing your place.

Founders and operators

You’re halfway through a doc when you remember something that will matter next week. “Remind me to follow up with them Tuesday.” It becomes a real reminder that comes back to you, not a line in a notes file you will never reopen. Same for “save this”: it is retrievable later from the app rather than lost to a tab you eventually close.

Individually these are small. Across a week they are where a lot of time goes.

Where this is going: work should move by itself

Here is the thing worth saying plainly. In most teams, the person is the transport layer. A decision gets made in a call and a human carries it to a doc. A bug gets spotted and a human carries it to a tracker. A question gets asked in a channel and a human carries the answer back. None of that is the work. It is the overhead of the work having to live in a dozen different places.

That is the future we’re building toward, and it is less about collecting logos than about four motions disappearing.

Say it once, and it lands where it belongs

You say the thought out loud and it ends up in the right doc, the right page, the right row. The decision from the call goes into the project page in Notion. The number you just worked out goes into the Google Sheet everyone reads. The summary lands in the Google Doc instead of in a message you send yourself. Writing something down should not require knowing where it lives.

A problem becomes tracked work while you’re still looking at it

You are staring at the bug. That is the moment you have the most context about it, and it is exactly the moment when opening a tracker and filling in six fields feels like too much. It should be enough to describe it out loud and have a real ticket exist in Linear, Jira, GitHub or ClickUp, with the context you already had rather than the summary you can still remember tomorrow.

Catch up and respond without opening the firehose

Coming back to a busy Slack channel or a Discord server after a few hours should not mean reading everything to find the two things that needed you. Ask what happened, get the short version, say the reply, move on. The value is not the summary, it is not having to open the app and lose twenty minutes.

The messages that don’t live in a work tool

Plenty of real work happens in WhatsApp and in ordinary Messages, especially outside the US and especially for anyone dealing with clients, suppliers or contractors. We think an assistant that ignores those is ignoring a lot of the actual job.

We’ll be straight about this one: it is the hardest of the four by a wide margin. These are the most personal conversations a person has, and the platforms are the most restricted, deliberately so. Any version of this has to be built to a much higher standard of consent and restraint than a work tool needs, and we would rather do it slowly and properly than ship something that treats your private messages as just another data source.

The point of all of it is the same. The work you do all day lives in a handful of apps, and moving things between them by hand is exactly the kind of small, repeated friction Aura exists to take off your plate. If there is one you would want first, tell us. That genuinely is how we decide the order.

Everything in one place when you want to look back

Not all of it lives in the moment. Your past conversations, the drafts Buddy wrote, the things you saved, and your meeting notes are all there in the desktop app when you want to find something again. The in-the-moment help is the point, but nothing you asked for just evaporates.

What’s on your screen stays yours

Screen context only works if you trust it, so here is exactly what happens to every kind of data the app touches. No summary, no “we take your privacy seriously”, just the table.

On the software itself: every Aura Desktop executable and installer is signed with Windows Authenticode and timestamped, so you get a named publisher rather than an unknown-publisher warning, and anyone in IT can verify who built the binary before it goes near a managed machine. Automatic updates carry a separate cryptographic signature that the app checks before it applies anything.

You stay in control

Screen context is powerful, which is exactly why it has to be clear and permission-based.

Aura should help you work with what you choose to share, not quietly take over your computer. You decide when to open it, what to ask, and when screen context is useful. Capture is always something you turn on, never something running behind your back. Connected services are per-service toggles you can switch off at any time. The point is to remove friction, not to remove your control.

Frequently asked questions

Which platforms does Aura Desktop support?

Windows and Mac. Voice, text chat, system-wide voice typing, meeting notes, and screen sight all work on both. The interview companion is Windows-only for now. The Mac build ships as a signed universal app for both Apple Silicon and Intel, on macOS 14.4 or later. There is no Linux build yet.

Does Aura record or store my screen?

No. When Buddy looks at your screen, that frame is held in memory only long enough to answer you, then discarded. It is not written to a database, not written to our logs, and not sent to analytics. There is no archive of your screens on a server, because we never keep one.

Does voice typing work offline or before I sign in?

No. Voice typing uses a streaming cloud recognizer, which needs both an internet connection and a signed-in account. An earlier version ran entirely on-device, but the accuracy was not good enough to be worth the 650MB it added to the installer, so we replaced it. Signed out or offline, the shortcut shows an error and types nothing rather than failing silently.

What happens to the audio from a meeting?

Meeting audio never leaves your machine unencrypted. Segments are encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a per-install key wrapped by Windows DPAPI in your user account's scope, so the files are useless if copied to another machine. A scheduled retention job deletes the local audio after seven days. The written note stays; the audio does not.

Do I have to connect a Google account?

No. Connecting Gmail or Google Calendar is optional and controlled per service from the Connections page in the app. Screen-aware help, voice typing, and meeting notes all work without connecting anything, and you can disconnect a service at any time.

Is the Windows installer signed?

Yes. Every Aura Desktop executable and installer is signed with Windows Authenticode and timestamped, so Windows shows a named publisher instead of an unknown-publisher warning and anyone in IT can verify who built the binary. Automatic updates carry a separate cryptographic signature that the app verifies before applying an update.

How much does Aura Desktop cost?

Every account starts with 45 days of the full Pro experience, no card required. After that you can stay on the free tier, which has daily limits, or move to a Companion or Pro plan.

Where to start

Aura Desktop starts with 45 days of the full Pro experience and no card. If any of the four motions above are things you do by hand every day, it is worth twenty minutes of your time to find out whether it takes them off your plate.

You can grab the Windows build or read why we started Aura in the first place.

A note from me, since this post is written as “we”: Aura started as one person’s frustration with switching tabs to ask a question about something already on screen, and a lot of what’s above came out of using it all day and finding it wanting. If you try it and something is broken or annoying, tell me directly. I read all of it, and it is still the fastest way to change what gets built next.
Varun, founder of Aura