The best Highlight AI alternatives for Mac

Koi turns Highlight's model around: it sees nothing until you ask. Tap Fn + ⌘ once and talk, and Koi answers out loud. A picture of the screen goes with each question, or only when you ask, or never, your choice. It circles the button you need, highlights the sentence it means, draws a diagram over the screen, rewrites selected text in any app, and clicks around the Mac for you. It never buys, sends, posts, deletes or signs in; the app enforces that.

For meetings, tap Fn + ⌃ and pick Online call or In person. Koi records the call with no bot: You and Them are written down apart, transcribed on your Mac, with the screen's video saved beside them. When it ends, Koi asks whether to summarize it, and only with a yes do the transcript's words go to its AI for a title, summary, your to-dos and a follow-up email draft. A few minutes before a meeting, it can offer a brief built from your own documents about it.

What it lacks next to Highlight: no all-day memory, so it can't remind you of something it never saw. No daily recap, no integrations beyond Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Reminders, no team plan and no SOC 2. It's Mac only (macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon and Intel). Pro is $20 a month, or $192 a year, after a 3-day trial that needs a card, with a monthly limit on the assistant. Dictation and recorded calls are unlimited on every plan. Lifetime is paid once: $59 for the first 25 buyers, then the price climbs as it sells.

Littlebird calls itself your always-on AI assistant. It learns by reading the active window, takes meeting notes without a bot, runs routines like a morning briefing, and can plug its memory into other AI tools over MCP. Hundreds of integrations are optional. Passwords, cards and banking sites are off limits from day one.

Basic is free, with daily credits and limited meeting notes. Plus is $17 a month billed yearly ($204), Power $42 a month billed yearly, and Pro $100 a month; students get Plus for $15 a month. Data is stored encrypted on AWS, it lists SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA, and training is off for good. The Mac app needs Apple silicon and macOS 13 or later; there's a Windows app and phone companions. It doesn't mention voice or dictation.

If meetings were the part of Highlight you used, Granola AI is the best-known swap. It's a notepad: you jot during the call and it fills your notes in from the transcript afterwards. No bot joins; it captures your device's audio, and you start it for each meeting. It runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android and Apple Watch, in 32 languages.

Basic is free with 30 days of meeting history. Business, at $14 per user a month, adds pre-meeting briefs, follow-up emails, integrations and unlimited history. Its security page says audio isn't stored, transcription goes to outside providers, and Granola trains its own models on anonymized data unless you opt out. More in Granola AI alternatives.

Shadow calls itself the AI meeting assistant that captures what's said and shown. No bot joins, transcription happens on the Mac, and it takes screenshots of what's shared in the meeting. Action Skills on a hotkey paste their results where your cursor is.

There's a free plan, and Plus is $8 a month. It's a Mac app for meetings, not an assistant for the rest of your screen.

HeyClicky looks at your screen only when you press its hotkey. Ask out loud and it draws on the screen to point the way, or hand the task to one of its agents, which work with apps you connect and run routines in the background. It doesn't take meeting notes.

Free gives 25 talk and 25 agent messages a month. Pro is $20 a month with unlimited talk, and Max is $100. Everything runs in the cloud, and its trust page says the AI's analysis of each screenshot is kept. Our HeyClicky review goes through it.

Ambient, launched September 24, 2026, is a voice helper that floats over any Mac app. Double-press Fn to hand it a task, like research or booking a flight, and it checks in when it's done or needs your approval. In guidance mode it draws arrows or rings showing where to click, and leaves the clicking to you. Hold Fn to dictate or rewrite selected text.

It needs macOS 15 or later. Vellum hasn't set a separate price for it: the free Base plan runs on prepaid credits, a dollar each, and paid plans are $30, $100 and $200 a month. You can bring your own model keys or run a local model through Ollama.