Whisply for proctored exams

A proctored exam is the most hostile environment a piece of software can run inside. The proctoring app takes over the screen, watches the camera, listens to the room, and sometimes inspects the list of running processes. Anything in a browser tab gets blocked by the lockdown shell before it even loads. Anything on a second device gets caught the moment the camera does a room scan. The tools you use the rest of the year were not designed for any of this.

Whisply was built the opposite way around. Instead of starting in a browser and trying to hide, it starts as a native macOS menu-bar app and uses Apple's own content protection APIs to stay out of capture surfaces. The proctor sees the exam, the camera sees you, and the assistant lives in a layer the recording was not designed to read. The whole point of the architecture is that nothing about the test session has to change for it to work.

We are not framing this as a tool against the proctor. The proctor still runs. The exam still runs. The recording still records. Whisply is a private window on your own machine that helps the person sitting at the keyboard, the same way a printed reference sheet would help if the rules allowed one. We just built the most discreet version of that idea that the Mac platform supports.

Pro Undetected is the tier built for testing days. It costs $149.99 monthly or $44.99 a month on the annual plan, and it lifts the daily message limits on the Free tier so you do not run out mid-exam. The flagship feature is the armed proctor-resistant mode, which loads the per-app behavior we wrote for each named proctoring environment.

The list, in full, is LockDown Browser, Safe Exam Browser, Examplify, OnVUE, VUE Lock, Prometric, Honorlock, Guardian, Proctorio, Hawkes, Inspera, LMI Rescue, Meazure, Digiexam, Exam.net, SecureBr, ProctorTrack, ProProctor, Examity, Kryterion, Surpass, NBME, and Gradescope. Each one is treated as a first-class target. If a new build of one of these ships and something changes, we treat it as a bug and fix it.

Three more environments, TestNav, ACT, and Edvistas, sit behind a one-time $500 whitelist tier. They need extra engineering attention to support cleanly, and the price reflects the work. Everything else on the supported list is included in Pro Undetected at the standard price.

The overlay is a small, modal window summoned by Cmd+Return. It opens above whatever app is in focus, takes your question by keystroke or voice, streams the answer, and disappears when you hit the same hotkey again. There is no taskbar entry, no dock icon while it is hidden, and no notification sound. The only persistent UI is a small icon in the menu bar that you can hide entirely if you want.

Because the overlay uses macOS content protection, it is not visible to QuickTime screen recording, to Zoom or Teams screen sharing, or to the capture buffer most proctoring apps read from. If a proctor watches a live feed of your screen, the assistant is not in it. If the session is recorded for later review, the assistant is not in the recording either. The protection is enforced by the operating system, not bolted on by Whisply.

The Mac microphone permission is optional. If you grant it, Whisply can hear the exam software read a question out loud (for accommodations) or pick up a verbal prompt you mutter. If you do not grant it, the assistant is text-only and quieter still. Computer Use mode, which lets the assistant act on your Mac through Accessibility permission, is off by default and is rarely the right tool inside a lockdown environment.

Whisply is a privacy tool first. The framing on this page is the same one we apply everywhere else on the site. The assistant works for the person who installed it, on the machine they installed it on, and stays out of frames the user did not opt into. That is the standard, and proctored exams are a place where that standard happens to matter more than usual.

Models are bundled with the app, so there is no third-party API key floating around in plain text and no separate service watching what you ask. The overlay does not phone home with a transcript of the exam, and there is no telemetry channel that mirrors the screen back to a server. We wrote /undetectability to spell out exactly which APIs the overlay relies on and which ones it does not.

If you care about this kind of thing in detail, the manifesto at /manifesto explains why we built Whisply the way we did. The short version is that an assistant should sit beside you, not above you, and certainly not behind you taking notes for someone else.

We are honest about scope. Some testing environments are outside what we support, and we will not pretend otherwise to land a sale. If your exam runs on a platform that is not on the supported list above and is not on the whitelist tier, the right answer is to not use Whisply for that session. We would rather lose the customer than mislead them into a bad outcome.

Whisply is a tool. Use it the way you would use any other study aid: within the rules that apply to you. We do not position the product as something designed to break academic rules, and that is not how we describe it or build it.

Whisply is the original Mac-native real-time AI overlay. The architecture, the hotkey, the menu-bar surface, and the proctor-aware mode were all built from scratch around what a Mac can do that a browser cannot. Other tools exist in adjacent spaces and some of them are good at what they do. Notetaker bots are good at recording meetings. Browser extensions are good at filling in forms. Mobile assistants are good at standing on your desk.

Whisply is a different category. It runs on the Mac you already use, in a layer the operating system already protects, with first-class behavior for the proctoring stacks people actually sit in front of. That is the thing it is the first to do, and that is the thing this page is about.