Memoe, in short
How to use Memoe: Moe is the assistant in your notch that you speak to, that speaks back, and that does the work on your Mac. Every screen, what starts on and off, and what leaves your Mac and when.
Memoe is an app that lives on your Mac, and Moe is the assistant inside it. You say what you need, out loud or typed, and Moe goes and does it: reads the mail and calendar you connect, takes the notes in a meeting, works the Mac itself, remembers what you told it last month, and asks before anything goes out to another person. It is free, it runs on your Mac, and the thinking comes from an AI account you already have.
These pages describe every part of Memoe as it is today: what each screen does, what each switch changes, what starts on and what starts off, and what leaves your Mac and when. They are written for you, not for the people building Memoe, and they are kept in step with the app.
What you need#
- A Mac with Apple silicon, running macOS 15 or later.
- Something for Moe to think with: a Claude or ChatGPT plan, a key from a model company, or a model running on your own Mac. Moe has no mind of its own and no account of its own. See Settings › Brain.
- For the cloud half, an optional plan: Away. Everything else is free and stays free.
Where things are#
- The notch. Moe lives under the notch at the top of your screen. Hold the talk key and it listens; hover and it opens; it glows amber when it has something for you. A Mac without a notch gets a small black tab in the middle of the menu bar instead.
- The main window (⌘0, or Show Window in the Memoe menu) has five rows: Chat and Meetings; Memory under Library; Connections and Message Moe under Reach. Settings (⌘,) is at the bottom, and the footer shows two dots: Connected and Voice ready.
- Settings has fourteen panes: Brain, Replies, Voice, Meeting Capture, Permissions, Reminders, Running in the background, Activity, Chats, Skills, Usage, Upgrade (called Away once you have a plan), Privacy, and About & Licences. Each has a page here.
- The menu-bar icon is a small waveform; it turns into a red dot while a meeting is recording. Its menu has Talk to Moe, Open Moe, Start meeting, Always Listening ("Hey Moe"), Hide Island and Quit Moe.
Memoe is in beta#
You are early. Memoe does a great deal already and it is still being built, so expect the odd bug and a few rough corners, and expect it to change often between versions. The app says so beside its version in Settings › About & Licences and on the first screen of the welcome.
When you hit something, tell Moe: out loud or typed, "that didn't work" is enough. It writes the report itself and, once you have allowed problem reports, it reaches us with what is needed to fix it. See When Moe itself breaks. From outside the app, hello@moebot.app.
How to read these pages#
Every page is one part of Memoe, in the order you meet it: getting started, talking, the settings that shape the answers, driving the Mac, the gate in front of anything that goes out, meetings, the things Moe does on its own, its memory, what you connect, the chat apps you can message it from, the cloud, privacy, and what happens when Moe itself breaks. Search at the top looks through all of it; press / to jump to the box.
Start
- Getting startedDownload Memoe from moebot.app/download. Every Download button on the site opens a short sheet first, saying what is in the box and what opening it looks like; Download Memoe for Mac starts the download. It is a large download, a little over a gigabyte, because everything Moe needs is inside it: the speech and voice models that run on your Mac, and the part of Moe that does the thinking. Setting up fetches nothing, so the first run works offline.
- Talking to MoeFour ways in, and they all end in the same place: Moe listening, the notch lit green.
- Settings › BrainMoe has no mind of its own; it borrows one you already have. Settings › Brain is whose, which model, and how hard it thinks: three things on one page, and no Apply button. Tapping a chip saves it, hands it to the part of Moe that thinks, and checks that Moe still answers.
- How Moe answers youMoe is a voice assistant that you can also type to, and it tells the difference: a question asked out loud comes back out loud and short; a question typed comes back written, at the length it needs. Settings › Replies is where that is decided.
Doing
- Driving your MacMoe can see your screen and use your Mac, open an app, click a button, fill a field, through the same accessibility machinery a screen reader uses. Clicks are delivered straight to the target window in the background, so your cursor does not move, your keyboard focus does not change, and you can keep typing while Moe works in another window.
- Before anything goes outMoe never sends anything to another person on its own. When it is about to, an email, a WhatsApp or Telegram message, a reply in a thread, a calendar invitation, a file shared with someone, a sheet opens on this Mac first: which service it is going out on, who it is going to, and the whole message. Send sends it. Cancel (or Esc) does not, and Moe is told you said no rather than trying again. The line at the top says Nothing has been sent yet for as long as the sheet is up. Return is deliberately bound to nothing; ⌘↩ is Send.
- MeetingsMoe sits in on a meeting on your Mac, records your microphone and the call's audio, writes a live transcript and, at the end, notes: a title, a summary, decisions, action items, to-dos and open questions. Everything stays on your Mac. Recording never starts without you.
- Running in the backgroundSettings › Running in the background is everything Moe does on its own while you work: one pane, five tabs, Speaking up · Reminders · Keeping up · Learning about you · Activity. Some of it starts on: the glow, the ten-minute look at your calendar, notes and messages, thinking on its own, the calendar heads-up, and quiet hours. The rest is off until you switch it on, and each row says what it is doing right now. Turning anything off stops it straight away, and it stays off after a restart.
- RemindersAsk Moe to remind you of anything: "remind me at three to call Dan", "every weekday at nine, ask me what the day is for". Moe's thinking part keeps the schedule. When one comes due it takes the amber glow, even with Let Moe bring things up on its own switched off, because you asked for it, and it is sent to every chat you ticked under Running in the background › Reminders.
- SkillsA skill is a page of instructions Moe reads when a job looks like the one the page describes: how to work a spreadsheet, how to read a PDF, how to run a GitHub review, how to talk to Obsidian. Moe does not run a skill; it reads it, and then does what it says with the tools it already has. A fresh install comes with about a hundred of them.
Knowing
- Memory: what Moe knows about youMoe carries what it has learned about you into every conversation, so you do not have to explain yourself twice. It is a short list of plain facts, who you are, who matters to you, how you like things done, and you can read the whole of it, correct any line of it, or throw a line out. All of it stays on this Mac unless you set up Away, and even then it travels sealed. It is deliberately small, because every word of it is read before Moe answers anything at all, so what is in there has to earn its place.
- ChatsChat in the main window is where you type to Moe and read what it said. The rail on the left, Conversations, lists your conversations by day; the pencil starts a fresh one (⌘N), and a right-click on one offers Delete. The box at the bottom says Ask Moe, or Ask Moe — quietly while a meeting is recording; + beside it adds a photo or a file, the microphone button talks, and Return sends. An empty conversation greets you, Hey. What's up?, and says to hold the talk key or type.
- ActivityMost of what Moe does happens where you are not looking. A reply goes out on Telegram while you are in a meeting. A briefing runs at seven and is gone by the time you sit down. Something Moe watches for you stops working and the only sign is a line in a file nobody opens. Settings › Activity is the one place all of that lands, newest first, under Today, Yesterday, then the weekday for the rest of the week and the date beyond that. Refresh at the top reads it again.
- UsageEvery question you ask costs tokens. On most plans what runs out is not money but a window, how much you can use in five hours, or in a week, so Settings › Usage puts that first and the money second. Refresh at the top reads it again. This is what Moe has used on this Mac; Moe Away keeps its own record on its own machine.
Reach
- ConnectionsConnections, under Reach in the main window, is everything Moe can read and act on for you: the apps already on this Mac, Google, and around 1,400 other services. Everything on it works while the Mac is awake; asleep, Moe is asleep too, unless you have Away.
- Message MoeMessage Moe, under Reach in the main window, is the chat apps you can message Moe from, so a text from your phone gets an answer. It answers while this Mac is awake; asleep, your message waits, unless you have Away, where your cloud computer answers instead and it is the same conversation.
- Away: Moe when your Mac is closedEverything Moe does on your Mac is free and stays free. Away is the optional half: a private computer of your own in the cloud, running the same Moe, so it keeps working while your Mac is closed. It answers your messages from your phone, runs your reminders, checks what you've connected on a schedule, keeps your memory and conversations in step across your devices, and speaks in the Premium voice. Your words and your memory travel sealed: the service in between carries them and cannot read them.
Trust
- PrivacyOn the free plan nothing about you leaves your Mac. Three things send something to us, and each one asks you first: signing in with Google, which sends only who you are; starting Away, which moves Moe into your own cloud computer; and problem reports, which send what you asked us to look at. The speech recognition, the voice, the transcription and the memory all run on your Mac. The full policy is at moebot.app/privacy, and it lists every service that ever touches your data.
- When Moe itself breaksIf something about Moe is wrong, not your mail or your calendar but Moe, a feature that stopped working, a crash, an answer that was plainly wrong, say so: "report this to the Moe team." Moe was there for the conversation, so it writes the report itself: what you asked, what it did, what came back, and where it went wrong. You don't have to explain it twice. Moe also files a report on its own when it notices something of its own failing that you haven't mentioned yet, and tells you it has.
- Updates, About and LicencesMemoe updates itself, quietly. It checks once a day, sending a plain request that says which version of Memoe is asking and nothing about you, and when there is a new version it downloads it in the background. Once it has downloaded, the notch glows amber, the same way it does when a reminder is waiting, and the panel under the notch says A new version of Memoe is ready. with Restart to update: press it and Moe closes, puts the new version in place and opens again. Later puts the question and the glow away for a day, or until Moe next opens. Moe never restarts on its own to install an update, and it never asks in the middle of something: not while a meeting is being recorded, not while it is listening or speaking, and not while it is working on an answer. If you simply quit Moe or restart your Mac, the update goes in then. No download on your part, no dragging, and no Gatekeeper dialog again. A new version reaches everyone over a day or so rather than all at once.