Alter

Alter is a powerful tool that enhances your productivity by seamlessly integrating AI to help you manage tasks across your favorite apps.

With Alter, you can significantly increase your efficiency as it intelligently pulls in context from the application you're currently using. Whether you're working in Finder, Apple Mail, or Keynote, this tool has unique features tailored just for those platforms.

Accessing Alter is super easy! Just use a global shortcut like `alt+option` to bring up the contextual menu. You’ll see a list of actions that you can quickly perform, all equipped with handy keyboard shortcuts. In fact, there are over 60 AI-powered actions designed to assist you right when you need them.

For instance, if you’re watching YouTube videos, Alter can provide a concise summary from the video’s transcript. If you’ve highlighted some emails in Apple Mail, it can extract key to-dos from those conversations. When you open Keynote, it can even help generate a draft presentation by pulling in relevant images from the web. You can easily translate text, fix grammar errors, or adjust the tone when you select text. Got something in LinkedIn? Alter can help expand your highlight into a full post. And if you’re looking at a research paper in Finder, just ask it to analyze the document for you. Plus, whether you’re dealing with files, folders, or even git commits in your code editor, Alter can summarize or generate insightful commit messages.

But that’s not all! Alter offers co-intelligences that cover a wide range of topics, from marketing and business to mental models and software engineering. You can engage in conversations with these specialized AIs to brainstorm ideas, troubleshoot issues, or gain expert insights on specific subjects.

What’s great is that customization is a key feature of Alter. You can create your own actions tailored to your personal workflow and even select different shortcuts for each action or folder. You won’t need any complicated API keys to access a variety of AI models, including OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Groq, and Together. And if you have your own API key or prefer using local models, Alter supports OpenAI-compatible endpoints. For those who value privacy, you can choose to use Ollama and LM Studio for an offline experience.

If you’re curious about how Alter stacks up against the official ChatGPT desktop app, check out a detailed comparison at this link.