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aibar is an AI assistant living in your MacBook's notch. It hears you through a speech model running on the Neural Engine, answers through the model you choose — Apple's on-device intelligence, your own local server, or a Gemini key — and operates the Mac itself: volume, brightness, Wi-Fi, timers, apps.
250–400 ms
speech becomes text, measured on an M1 — entirely on-device
15
system tools the assistant can actually operate
<50 MB
resident memory while it waits in the notch
24 h
on battery with aibar running, measured against a control day without it. Its draw came out smaller than the difference between two ordinary days — too small to separate from the machine's own noise.
aibar's tools report FAILED when an action doesn't happen — the model isn't allowed to call it done. This page follows the same rule, which is why the battery figure sat empty here for weeks until someone actually measured it.
The measurement: one MacBook Air M1 on battery for a full working day with aibar running in the background, against the same machine on an ordinary day without it. A working Mac spends its battery on the work — the browser, the editor, the compiler — and the question was only whether aibar adds to that. It didn't. The day with aibar actually ran slightly cheaper than the day without, which is not a claim that it saves power; it means the difference is smaller than the gap between any two ordinary days.
One thing did show up. With the lid shut, aibar cost about 0.4 % an hour against a 0.1 % floor — roughly three percent of a charge overnight. Small in absolute terms, and it would have been easy to leave out. The cause was two background pollers that woke the machine every three seconds and had no reason to run while the screen was asleep; they now stop when it does. The fix was then measured the same way it was found: a second overnight run on the patched build put the sleeping cost back at the 0.1 % floor — indistinguishable from the same Mac without aibar.
Speech recognition is Parakeet v3 on the Neural Engine — English and Russian in one model, roughly a third of a second to text. The reply appears as text in the notch. No audio is streamed anywhere.
Hold Fn, speak, release — the words type themselves into whatever app has focus.
⌘⇧Space starts a voice query without leaving what you're doing. A red pill in the notch shows the mic is live.
Drag files into the notch, carry them between apps and Spaces, drop them where they're needed.
Weather, now playing, CPU, calendar, clipboard — a glanceable strip that only polls while open.
Volume, brightness, dark mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, music, timers, opening apps, running Shortcuts. When a tool fails, it reports FAILED and the assistant says so. Never a false "done".
Apple's on-device model — free, private, English. Any OpenAI-compatible local server — Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp. Or Gemini with a free API key, for cloud answers in any language.
NotchNook proved the notch is worth using, and it's a polished product. Its own reviews keep returning to one complaint: battery drain.
aibar's first engineering rule is that the notch must cost almost nothing while idle: models unload on battery, polling stops when the notch closes, and pollers stop again when the screen sleeps. The day-long measurement above is what that rule buys — a full day where the battery could not tell whether aibar was running.
The Siri coming in macOS 27 wants an M3 or newer and answers through a cloud. On an M1 or M2 — or for questions that shouldn't leave the room — that upgrade isn't coming. aibar runs there today.
During the beta — yes, all of it. The long-term plan is a free hub with a paid AI tier; beta testers keep early access.
Speech recognition — always, on the Neural Engine. The language model — your call: Apple on-device and local servers never touch the network; Gemini is a cloud model behind your own key. System tools run locally by definition.
aibar has no backend. There is nothing to sign into, no account, and your API keys live in the macOS Keychain on your machine.
An assistant that changes your volume, toggles Wi-Fi and runs Shortcuts can't live inside the App Store sandbox. aibar ships as a Developer ID–signed, notarized DMG instead — Gatekeeper checks it like any other Mac app.
macOS 14 or newer on Apple silicon. The Apple on-device model additionally needs macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence enabled; local servers and Gemini work everywhere.