Pluely

I build Pluely, so read everything below as coming from someone with a stake in it. The first version was embarrassing. An input box, an answer, and a trick to keep the window out of screen shares. I made it for myself, put it online, and people kept finding it. A year later it has 55,000 downloads and over 5,000 hours of meetings transcribed, and over 10 billion tokens. It also had a GitHub issue where a user attached an HTML test page proving my overlay stole focus from the browser for a fraction of a second every time it took a screenshot. That report is what made me rebuild the whole thing properly this summer. What it is now: a desktop overlay for macOS, Windows and Linux that listens to a call, transcribes it live with speaker labels, and drafts an answer when someone asks a question. It stays out of screen shares. There is an Ask mode for a typed question, a screenshot or a file. Everything is saved on your computer. It is free with your own API key or a CLI like Claude Code with dev license, and there is a paid plan if you want hosted models and transcription without keys. Things that surprised me while rebuilding: • Staying out of the way is mostly about focus, not pixels. The moment the overlay takes keyboard focus, the app you are sharing loses it. On macOS the fix was a non-activating panel. On Windows I had to write my own keyboard hook, because the window can never be the foreground. • Meeting detection was the most requested feature and the simplest to build once I stopped trying to be clever. On macOS I just watch whether the microphone is in use by another app. • The bug you cannot reproduce is usually a hardware bug. The Windows shortcut problems sat open for two months until one user sent their monitor layout and GPU model with the steps. Ten minutes later I had it. I would like to hear what would make this useful or useless for you, especially from people on Linux, which I test the least. It is called Pluely and the site is pluely.com.