Select to ask,
hear to translate
Cue is an AI assistant that sits quietly in your menu bar. It works on what you select and what you hear — no window switching, no copy-paste.
claude / codex CLI
Select text in any app — and act on it
In your browser, mail, docs, code — anywhere you highlight text, a floating toolbar appears right next to it. Each button is a skill you define. One click opens a streaming conversation you can keep asking.
The transformer architecture relies on a mechanism called self-attention, which lets the model weigh the relevance of every token against every other token in the sequence, enabling it to capture long-range dependencies without recurrence.
👆 Click the highlighted text, then pick any skill from the toolbar
Read live subtitles in your language
Capture a meeting app's audio, transcribe and translate it entirely on-device, and read it as a floating subtitle bar — original on top, translation below. No network, no LLM.
Settings, the macOS way
A native sidebar window (⌘,). Toggle the toolbar, choose your AI backend and model, manage skills, set your languages — and start Cue at login so it's always there.
Used by all skills. “Default” uses the CLI's own default model; pick a named one for speed/quality, or “Custom” to enter any model the CLI accepts.
Two independent capability layers
claude or
codex CLI already signed in
on your machine, streaming
token-by-token. Multi-turn context is
replayed in-app, so interrupting a turn
never loses it.
SpeechTranscriber,
translation via Apple's
Translation framework. No
LLM, no network — audio and text stay on
your Mac.
Quiet, fast, and yours to shape
Custom skills
Each skill is a prompt template that references
the selection with {{selection}}.
Name it, pick an SF Symbol icon, drag to
reorder.
Low-latency startup
Tool-free skills skip MCP loading and the CLIs are pre-warmed at launch. Pick a faster model per backend (e.g. Haiku / o4-mini).
Follow-up conversations
Clicking a skill opens a chat window you can keep questioning. Context lives in-app, surviving an interrupted turn.
Per-app audio source
Capture system audio or one specific app. Drafts translate as they're recognized, then re-translate once the sentence finalizes.
Shared glossary
Maintain a list of preferred terms so translations and answers stay consistent on the words that matter to you.
Menu-bar resident
Runs as an accessory app, no Dock icon. Settings live in a sidebar window (⌘,) that appears only when you need it.
Meeting translation never leaves your Mac
Speech recognition and translation run entirely
on-device — no LLM, no network requests.
Selection skills call the CLI you've already
signed in to, and your data stays in local JSON
under
~/Library/Application Support/Cue/.
Put AI into every selection and every conversation
Cue never competes for your attention — it shows up only the second you need it.