Whitespace.
See who already built your idea — and the space they left open.

CLUSTER MACOS-SELECTED-TEXT · 7 ENTRIES · EARLIEST ENTRY 2026-09-09

Floating macOS AI Assistants

These products are floating AI assistants for macOS that handle text selection tasks—translating, explaining, summarizing, and rewriting—and save notes to a personal knowledge base. The cluster's dated history is too thin to read a shape from, as it has no dated entries before the index start. Traction leaders are ReadBrief (9 stars), minne (6), and Magpie (1).

Entry timeline

ENTRY TIMELINE

AUG 2026: 2SEP 2026: 5
AUG 2026SEP 2026

Each bar is the month a member carries, which is a creation date where the source published one and a crawl date otherwise. Nothing in the index was found before 11 August 2026, and coverage broadened sharply on 14–15 August, so a bar from then on reports how much we found that month, not how much was built; an earlier bar reports how far back a member's own source dated it — not how long we have been watching.

Members by activity

Activity signals, not revenue.

Build origin · 1 hand-coded · 6 unlabelled

Operator · 6 hobby · 1 unlabelled

Two labels per entry, never collapsed into one: how it was built, and who stands behind it. Counted over the 7 listed below. Unlabelled means nothing has decided yet — not that the answer is small.

  1. 01ReadBrief12★23 dayslivehobbymacOS utility that summarizes selected text from any application into a floating popup using a connected AI service.
  2. 02minne6★1 mo—hobbyMenu-bar application that observes on-screen text activity, distills it into a local markdown knowledge base, and lets an AI assistant answer questions using that context.
  3. 03Magpie1★20 days—hobbyAI reading companion for macOS that translates, explains, or summarizes selected text in a floating bar and saves notes to a personal knowledge base.
  4. 04ty0★18 days—Floating AI assistant for macOS that answers questions, runs slash commands, and captures notes into a personal knowledge base from a global hotkey.
  5. 05AI-Pet0★22 days—hobbyDesktop AI companion that floats on the screen and translates, explains, summarizes, or rewrites selected text aloud.
  6. 06jarvis-assistant0★17 days—hand-codedhobbyDesktop assistant for macOS that listens via local voice recognition, stores memories in a Markdown wiki, and reasons with Claude.
  7. 07read-assist0★1 mo—hobbymacOS reading companion that explains selected words and passages in plain language, helping readers understand books, documents, or web pages without leaving their reading app.

Ranked by traction, highest first, and paged 20 at a time — this is a window on the cluster, never the whole of it. Ties are broken by a stable id so a product cannot appear on two pages or fall between them. Browse every cluster.