Alter is built around a complaint about chat assistants: the answer arrives as text that the user then has to act on. Alter sits at the system level on macOS and performs the action instead — moving a file, drafting in the current app, pulling context from whatever is on screen — triggered by a keyboard shortcut or voice rather than a separate window.
Because it reads on-screen context, it can operate on the document in front of the user without copy-paste round trips. That model suits power users who live in a fixed set of native apps and want an assistant that respects the app they are already in, rather than one that pulls them into a browser tab.
Privacy control is a stated design point, with the user deciding what context is shared. Anyone evaluating it for regulated work should confirm which model providers receive data on the chosen plan. There is a free tier, with paid plans covering heavier usage.
