A private AI overlay for Zoom that only you see on Mac in 2026

A bot in a Zoom call shows up in the participant list with a name like Notetaker or Recording Bot. Everyone on the call sees it. People go quiet. Legal teams ask questions. The candor that made the meeting worth scheduling drains out of the room. You get a transcript, but you lose the conversation.

An overlay sits on your Mac instead of in the call. Zoom never knows it is there. The other people on the call never know it is there. The audio capture happens through your own machine, so nobody is recorded who did not agree to be on a recording. You are the only person who sees the answers and the only person who benefits from them.

This matters most in the calls where Zoom is the wrong venue for a bot. Customer interviews. Board updates. A reference check. A negotiation where the other side has a lawyer on. You still want help. You just do not want to broadcast that you have help, and you definitely do not want to put a third-party recorder on someone else's voice.

Whisply appears as a floating panel above Zoom when you press the hotkey. It can show a transcript of what the other person just said, a suggested follow-up question, a number you half-remembered, or a longer answer to something you asked it directly. You move it around your screen the same way you move any other window.

When Zoom is in share mode, macOS content protection hides the Whisply window from the shared stream. Your audience sees the deck or the document you meant to share. They do not see your overlay, your prompt, or the model's answer. The same protection applies to the host's cloud recording and to most screenshot tools that respect the OS-level flag.

On Pro Undetected, Whisply stays running through proctor-style screen capture environments as well, which matters less for Zoom and more for the people who use the same Mac for both work calls and remote exams. For a vanilla Zoom workflow, the Free tier and Pro tier handle the overlay-stays-private behavior the same way.

Two audio sources matter on a Zoom call. The voice of the other people, which arrives in your Mac through Zoom's output, and your own voice, which arrives through your microphone. Whisply asks for Microphone permission so it can listen to the call audio. macOS handles the rest natively through ScreenCaptureKit, so there is no virtual audio driver to install and no kernel extension to approve.

Because the capture is local, the model on the Zoom call gets exactly what it would have gotten without Whisply running. No second audio stream is being uploaded by your machine to anywhere the other party can see. The transcript and the assist live in the Whisply session on your Mac, scoped to you.

Whisply also requests Screen Recording permission so it can see the Zoom window when you ask a visual question. If a colleague is sharing a chart and you want a quick read of it, Whisply can look at what is on your screen and answer. The other side is not pulled into that loop. They are just sharing the chart, the same as always.

Whisply is built to be invisible to the room, not to be a secret you carry around with shame. The point of an on-device overlay is that you can hold yourself to the same standard as if you were taking notes by hand or pulling up a document on a second monitor. It is a tool that makes you sharper. People bring sharper versions of themselves to meetings all the time.

If you are recording the call for your own notes, say so. If you are using AI to summarize after the call, that is a normal disclosure now. The reason Whisply does not need a bot disclosure is that there is no bot, no separate recording artifact landing in a third-party cloud, and no voice capture happening for anyone other than you on your own machine. The compliance posture is closer to a notebook than to a notetaker.

The team you work with will tell you what is normal in your industry. Sales teams using Whisply for live discovery, recruiters using it for first-round screens, founders using it on investor calls, support engineers using it during incident bridges. Each context has its own etiquette. Whisply gives you the privacy to choose.

The most common pattern is a quick question. Somebody mentions a number you wanted to remember, or asks something you were not expecting, and you press Cmd+Return, type a sentence, and read the answer in the corner of your screen. Five seconds, no panic. You go back to the conversation with the right thing in your head.

The second pattern is a watching pattern. You leave Whisply open in a side panel and let it follow along. It transcribes what the other person said, surfaces follow-up questions you might want to ask, and keeps a running set of notes you can pull up afterwards. The other person sees your eyes on them, because Whisply is on your screen and not on theirs.

The third pattern, on Pro Undetected, is Computer Use. You can ask Whisply to actually do a thing on your Mac while the call is happening. Pull up a contract, search a CRM, open a Notion page. The action runs on your machine, not on the shared screen, so the work happens quietly and you stay present in the conversation.