Koi 2.0: your notch, a teleprompter and a board on your desktop

Every MacBook with a notch has a black strip at the top of the screen that does nothing. The camera is in it, and the menu bar works around it. Koi 2.0 moves in. The dock that used to sit on the edge of your screen now lives in the notch, and everything new in this release grows out of it.

Hover the notch and it opens down into a small black window: Talk, Dictate, Record, Documents and Calendar, with the Tools one pill away. Move the pointer off and it folds back up. It stays there: it can't be dragged or resized. On a Mac without a notch, Koi draws a small one of its own at the top of the screen.

Here is everything that's new, what it does, and where your data goes for each. We make Koi, so this is our own release, written by us.

Open the notch's Tools, click Teleprompter, paste your script and press Start. The notch grows down into a black panel right under the camera, and your script rolls up through it. You read while looking at the lens, so on a call or in a video you look at people instead of at your notes.

• It follows your voice. Speed up, slow down, stop to think, and it waits. A skipped sentence doesn't lose it. Your voice is heard on your Mac by the speech model and never sent.
• Or it scrolls at a steady speed, from 60 to 260 words a minute.
• Space pauses, the arrows and your trackpad go back and on, and Esc ends it. Mirror flips it for a teleprompter glass.
• While it's on, the notch is hidden from screen capture, so apps like Zoom, Meet and Teams leave it out of what they share or record.

More in the best teleprompter apps for Mac and how to use a teleprompter on Zoom.

Koi 2.0 has an endless board that works like Excalidraw, drawn by the app itself rather than a web page. It sits on your wallpaper as a widget, under every window and on every Space, showing the board as you left it. Click it and it grows into a big window. Esc folds it back.

Shapes with a hand-drawn look, arrows that stay connected when things move, a pen, text, sticky notes, frames, groups, photo frames, stickers and paper backgrounds. Export as PNG, PDF or SVG. Each board is a file on your Mac, never uploaded. Like any window, Koi's AI sees a board on screen when your screen goes with a question. Text to diagram and Wireframe to code send to Koi's AI only when you ask, and count against your plan's Koi usage.

More in the best whiteboard apps for Mac.

What's playing is read on your Mac, held in memory to show in the notch, and never stored or sent to our server. The first time a song plays, macOS asks whether Koi may read it. The AirPods, charger and volume moments are read on the Mac and kept nowhere; they're a switch in Settings, Notch & tools, “AirPods, charging and volume”. AirDrop sends your files itself, never through Koi's server.

How-tos: Spotify in the notch and AirDrop from the notch.

Keyboard sounds make every key you press click like a real keyboard, in any app. Pick one of 16 packs, from mechanical switches to a typewriter, a laptop and pops, and hear each one type “hello koi” as you pick it. They go quiet in password fields, while you dictate and on calls. Koi hears each key only to play its sound, and which key it was is never kept or sent. Off to begin with.

The idle screen is for when you step away. After a few minutes, every screen fades to black with a big calm clock, or a crowd of little Kois floating and bumping about. A move or a key brings everything back. It never starts during a call, a recording or a video. Off until you turn it on.

More in the best keyboard sound apps for Mac and the best screensavers for Mac.

1. Hover the notch to open Koi. The Tools pill holds the teleprompter, the board and keyboard sounds.
2. The board's widget is on your desktop from the start. Settings, Notch & tools, Board on the desktop turns it off.
3. Play a song in Spotify or Music, or drag a file up to the notch, to see those.
4. Keyboard sounds and the idle screen are in Settings, Notch & tools. Both are off until you turn them on.

Step by step: the notch, the teleprompter, the board, keyboard sounds and the idle screen. The whole story of each is on Koi in the notch, the teleprompter and the board.

All of it comes with Koi, with dictation in any app, call recording and Koi itself. Koi is $20 a month, $7 for a first week, or Lifetime, paid once, paid from the first day with no free trial. See Koi's plans.