Pace · v1 · for macOS
I got tired of Siri.
So I made one that stays on my Mac.
Pace is a voice assistant for macOS. Hold ctrl+option, say something, let go. It listens with your Mac's mic, reads your screen with a vision model on the same Apple Silicon chip, and clicks things for you. First answer in 420 ms. No accounts. No cloud. $29 once.
The whole point is that nothing leaves your Mac.
Including the bit where I tell you it doesn't.
Fig. 1 — the on-device pipeline
"open my inbox and snap it left"
Free with Apple Intelligence · One-time payment · No subscription
The on-device part
Other voice assistants ship your microphone to the cloud. Pace ships nothing.
Your voice goes through Apple's on-device SFSpeechRecognizer
or WhisperKit-Large running on your Apple Silicon. The microphone
never opens a socket. The transcript never reaches a server because
there isn't one.
Your screen goes through a 4-billion-parameter vision model (Qwen3-VL) that lives on the same chip. Screenshots are processed in-memory and freed. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is cached, nothing is analyzed off your machine.
Your memory — conversation history, durable facts, journals —
is one JSON file at
~/Library/Application Support/Pace/.
You can cat it. It's not encrypted
because it doesn't need to be — nobody but you has a copy.
What `nettop` says
Same output tomorrow.
And the week after that.
Other voice agents got fast by renting OpenAI's realtime API. Pace got fast by owning the silicon path.
Same answer time on a second turn. Very different bargain. Theirs streams your microphone to a server that bills per minute and can change its terms tomorrow. Ours never leaves the chip you already paid for.
What it does
Seven verbs. That's the whole product.
01
Listens.
Hold ctrl+option, say something, let go. Or press ctrl three times for always-on mode. Push-to-talk via a system-wide CGEvent tap. The first spoken word back arrives in about 420 milliseconds.
Apple Speech by default. WhisperKit-Large if you put the model on disk — Pace picks it up automatically.
02
Looks.
Ask about what's on your screen. Pace runs a local vision model + Apple Vision OCR + the macOS Accessibility tree in parallel, merges them into one element map, and hands the result to the planner.
Qwen3-VL-4B locally. Same model the LM Studio path used to host — now in-process, no max-loaded-models setting to wrestle with.
03
Clicks.
"Click submit," "snap this window left," "add this to my calendar." Pace executes through Accessibility — the right way to drive a Mac — and falls back to CGEvent only when AX can't find the element.
Every reversible change leaves a 5-second undo banner. Tap to roll back.
04
Teaches.
Learn Figma. Learn Cursor. Learn the obscure internal tool nobody documented. Pace draws on your screen, points at the next thing to click, waits for you to do it, then advances. Step-by-step, at your pace.
Click-follow-along is verification-driven: Pace knows when you actually clicked the right thing and moves you to the next step automatically.
05
Remembers.
Tell it once that you use Firefox, that your design doc is the pinned tab in Arc, that Alex is the engineer not the designer. It carries that across sessions, across quits, across reboots.
Two-tier memory: last four turns verbatim, everything older rolls into a summary. One JSON file, your home directory, your eyes only.
06
Connects.
Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Mail, Things, Shortcuts, Messages — first-class, through EventKit and AppleScript. Anything beyond Apple's native data goes through Composio's OAuth gateway when you choose to enable it.
Apple-native stays local. External SaaS is your choice, off by default.
07
Upgrades.
When I ship a Pace-tuned model that beats the off-the-shelf default, it comes through the same Sparkle updater every other Mac app uses. No re-purchase. No upgrade wall. Models live in your HuggingFace cache.
Current default is Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 bf16. The next one will have a name with `pace-` in front of it.
The competition
Pace isn't Siri. It's also not Raycast, Wispr Flow, or MacWhisper. Here's where each one stops.
Siri talks back. It doesn't read your screen, click on it, or remember what you talked about last week. Half its answers round-trip through Apple's servers, which is fine — until you're on a plane or behind a corporate proxy or just don't want to.
Raycast Pro is a launcher with a chat box bolted on. $8 a month, very good at what it does, runs everything through the cloud. If your job is keyboard shortcuts and quick LLM queries, use Raycast. If you want to be able to talk to it while your hands are elsewhere, you'll need something else.
Wispr Flow is voice-to-text. $12 a month. Excellent dictation. Doesn't see your screen. Doesn't do anything with what you said — it just types it.
MacWhisper Pro transcribes audio files. $59 once, fully offline, brilliant at one thing. If you have hours of meeting audio to convert, buy it. It is not an assistant.
Pace is the one doing voice and screen and actions and memory, fully on your machine, for $29 paid once. That isn't a feature list — that's the whole pitch. If any of the four above already covered what you need, you wouldn't be reading this far.
Pricing rechecked June 2026.
If anyone's gotten cheaper since, tell me and I'll update this paragraph.
What people say
From the people who already replaced something with it.
"I've tried Wispr Flow and Raycast Pro. Pace is the first one that actually reads my screen AND clicks for me. The fact that it does it all locally is the only reason I switched."
"Replaced six Shortcuts and a Raycast pro subscription. The on-device part isn't a marketing line — I checked nettop. It really is sending zero."
"I write all day and dictation kept breaking my flow. Pace lets me say "shorten this paragraph" out loud while keeping my hands on the keyboard. Underrated."
"The plan-then-execute thing is what sold me. Watching the model show its work before doing the thing makes me trust it. Other agents just do stuff and you guess what happened."
"Bought at $29 thinking I'd refund. It's been three weeks and I open it more than Spotlight now."
"Privacy was the whole reason I tried it. The memory file is a JSON I can read with cat. That's exactly the level of transparency I want from a voice assistant."
Bought it and have something nicer to say? Reply to my email — I might add yours here.
What it costs
You pay twenty-nine dollars one time and Pace is yours. The model runs on your Mac. The inference costs me nothing on an ongoing basis, so there's nothing to charge you for monthly.
When the first Pace-tuned model ships (sometime in the next two quarters, no exact date) the price for new buyers goes to $49. If you bought at $29 you keep getting the new models free, by way of the same Sparkle updater every other Mac app uses.
Try it free first. If your Mac has Apple Intelligence on, Pace runs against Apple's Foundation Models tier at no cost. It's the same app — you'll know within a week if the bundled stack is worth the $29.
Studio, $5/month, optional. Only useful if you want me to host the Composio routing instead of running it yourself. Most people skip it. Add it later or never.
30-day refund. No questions. The license deactivates, your card gets the money back.
macOS 14+, Apple Silicon, 16 GB RAM minimum.
32 GB if you want the bigger bf16 model loaded all the time —
otherwise the 4-bit variant is one Settings toggle away.
Before you buy
The questions people actually ask.
01.
Does it really run with no network?
Yes. Voice, screen reading, the planner, TTS — all on your Mac. The one exception is `download_file`, which fetches a URL only when you explicitly tell Pace to. The Privacy dashboard inside the app shows the exact byte count, broken out by surface.
02.
How much disk and RAM are we talking?
The .app is about 50 megabytes. The default model — Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 in bf16 — is ~8 gigabytes, downloaded once into your HuggingFace cache. With the vision model and transcription also loaded, peak RAM is ~14 GB. If your Mac has 16 GB, swap to the 4-bit variant in Settings → Models; that runs comfortably in ~6 GB.
03.
What Macs?
Apple Silicon, M1 or later, macOS 14+. Intel Macs aren't supported and there's no plan to add them — MLX is Metal-backed, and the on-device story is what the whole product is. Tested on M1 Air, M2 Pro, M3 Max, M4 Pro.
04.
iPhone? Windows?
No, and not on the roadmap. Pace is a Mac product. The Apple Silicon stack is what makes "voice + screen + actions, on-device, $29 once" possible at all. Spreading it across three operating systems would mean rebuilding the assumptions and raising the price.
05.
What happens when you ship your own model?
Free upgrade for everyone who already owns Pace. The .app updates through Sparkle; the new model identifier is just a string in Info.plist. Your existing license keeps working. The price for new buyers goes to $49 at that point — you're grandfathered in at $29.
06.
Do I need LM Studio installed?
No. The bundled MLX path covers planning, vision, embeddings, and TTS in-process. LM Studio is still supported as the power-user option if you'd rather run the larger Qwen3-30B model, but it's not required for a fresh install to be useful.
07.
Refund policy?
30 days, no questions. The .app deactivates and your card gets refunded. I don't ask why because I already know — the model wasn't a fit, or the bf16 download hurt more than you wanted. Both are valid.
08.
What if I don't like the voice?
Settings → Voice picks any Apple Premium voice on your Mac, or the bundled Qwen3 TTS, or the Kokoro sidecar if you want the higher-quality option. You're not locked into one synthesiser.
09.
What's Learning mode?
You point Pace at an app you don't know — Figma, Cursor, Logic Pro, an internal admin tool — and ask it to walk you through something. Pace draws on your screen, says "click here next," and when you actually click, it advances to the next step automatically. The verification loop is the new part: Pace watches your click events and only moves forward when you did the right thing.
10.
Can I leave it always-on?
Yes. Press ctrl three times to toggle wake-word mode — Pace listens passively and only reacts when it hears its name. Most users keep push-to-talk (ctrl+option) because it's clearer about when you're talking to it, but always-on is one shortcut away.
Anything else? email me and I'll add it here.