Ambient context · part of Nod

Half of your day never gets said out loud.

Meeting notes only know what was spoken. Switch ambient context on and Nod also reads the window you're working in — as text, on your Mac — so you can ask what you were doing, not just what was discussed. It ships off, and no update turns it on.

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Free for macOS · no card

Captures

The window you're actually in

Recording0:14

It reads the one window you're looking at. Your blocklist is checked before anything is read — not after.

Ignores

  • Password managers and one-time-secret sites
  • WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messages and other personal messengers
  • Any app, category, or site on your blocklist
  • Every other window, including the same app's
  • Anything at all, while you're paused

For the work that happens between the calls.

You spent the day in a ticket, a doc, and a spreadsheet. None of it was said out loud, so none of it is in your notes. Ask anyway.

  • The standup answer

    What you did yesterday is spread across a ticket, a pull request, and a doc you already closed. Ask once instead of reconstructing it.

  • A weekly review that writes itself

    What actually took the week — including the two hours nobody scheduled and no one wrote down.

  • Cross the call with the source

    You agreed one thing on the call and the spec says another. Nod can hold both, because it saw both.

  • The thing you read and can't find

    You know you saw it. You don't know whether it was Linear, Notion, or an email. Describe it and get it back.

How ambient context works

  1. 1

    You switch it on

    It's off until you turn it on, in Settings → Privacy or from the ambient control at the bottom of Nod's sidebar — which always shows whether it's on, off, or paused, so you never go looking for the off switch.

  2. 2

    Nod reads the focused window as text

    About every five seconds, through the same macOS accessibility interface screen readers use. No screenshots, no video, no keystrokes, no clipboard, no password fields. A screen that hasn't changed stays a single entry, not one every five seconds.

  3. 3

    You ask, later

    What Nod read joins your meetings in Ask Nod. Every entry carries an expiry — 14 days by default, and you choose — and a scheduled job deletes it server-side whether or not you ever open Nod again.

  • No bot joins

    Nod listens through your Mac. Nothing new shows up in anyone's call.

  • Audio is never stored

    Transcribed in the EU, then discarded. Notes are encrypted; your data never trains a model.

  • Works on day one

    A Mac and any Google account is all it takes. 14-day free trial, no card.

Ambient context questions

  • Is this screen recording?

    No. Nod keeps text, never a picture. No video is recorded and no image of your screen is ever saved. There is one honest exception: apps that tell macOS almost nothing about what they're showing — Slack, Figma, and other Electron or canvas-drawn apps — are converted from pixels to text on your Mac, at most once every 20 seconds. That image lives in memory for the moment recognition takes, is never written to disk, never uploaded, and is released immediately. Only the text is kept.

  • Does it read everything on my Mac?

    No — only the window you're actually focused on, never an app's other windows. Personal messengers and password managers are excluded before you touch anything, and your own exclusions are checked before a window is read, so an excluded app is never traversed at all. You can exclude any app, whole categories of website, or specific sites in Settings → Privacy.

  • Does what I had on screen end up in a summary I share?

    Never. Ambient context feeds Ask Nod — your own private chat — and nothing else. Meeting summaries and share links are built from the conversation's transcript alone, so nothing Nod read from your screen can travel to anyone you send a link to.

  • How long is it kept, and can I delete it?

    Entries expire after 14 days by default, and you can set that yourself. You can also delete on the spot from the same sidebar control — the last 5 minutes, 15 minutes, hour, or everything Nod has ever read from your screen. Deletion is immediate, permanent, and doesn't touch your meetings or transcripts.

  • Can I switch it off for one call?

    Pause it for 15 minutes, an hour, or the rest of the day. Nothing is read while it's paused, it resumes on its own when the time is up, and the pause survives quitting Nod. That way the call you wanted private doesn't cost you the feature for the rest of the week.

  • What does it need to work?

    The macOS Accessibility permission, which you grant explicitly. Without it, the switch tells you what's missing instead of sitting there looking on while nothing happens. The pixels-to-text step for apps like Slack and Figma additionally needs macOS 14 and the Screen Recording permission you already granted so Nod can hear a meeting.

The rest of Nod

Useful on your first call. Indispensable by your fiftieth.

Start free on macOS, no card. Every conversation you capture today is one you can still ask about a year from now.

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