The new Sky app from the people who brought you Apple Shortcuts brings AI assistance to the Mac, performing complex actions in any app or window.
The underlying AI algorithm and large language model (LLM) are key to Sky’s ability to understand what’s on your Mac’s screen. This allows the app to answer contextually relevant questions and take actions using apps installed on your Mac.
You also get your standard AI assistance for things like writing, coding, planning and more. The powerful app can be heavily customized via scripting support, custom actions in the Shortcuts app, prompts and more.
Sky app brings AI-powered assistance to your Mac
Developers shared a video showing Sky sending a message to a group chat, finding bar recommendations and scheduling calendar events, among others.
Sky was created by Ari Weinstein and Conrad Kramer, the brains behind the automation app Workflow, which Apple bought and created the Shortcuts app. The two founders became Apple employees as part of a post-acquisition transition. Two years ago, free of their contractual obligations, they left Apple and began work on Sky.
An exclusive look at Sky
For further information about the app, I cannot recommend enough an exclusive look by Federico Viticci over at MacStories.
What sets Sky apart from anything I’ve tried or seen on macOS to date is that it uses LLMs to understand which windows are open on your Mac, what’s inside them and what actions you can perform based on those apps’ contents. It’s a lofty goal and, at a high level, it’s predicated upon two core concepts.
And this:
First, Sky comes with a collection of built-in “tools” for Calendar, Messages, Notes, web browsing, Finder, email and screenshots, which allow anyone to get started and ask questions that perform actions with those apps. If you want to turn a webpage shown in Safari into an event in your calendar, or perhaps a document in Apple Notes, you can just ask in natural language out of the box.
Remarkably, what Sky does sounds a lot like what Apple has been trying to achieve with Apple Intelligence and an AI-infused Siri, and it’s still miserably behind. Want to try Sky? You’ll need to submit your email on the Sky website to join a waitlist. Sky is coming this summer.