Design Philosophy

SpotAsk is not a smaller ChatGPT. It is built on a different premise: not every question calls for a full AI platform. Many everyday questions — looking up a concept, translating a sentence, summarizing an article, polishing a reply — are lightweight, yet answering them often feels heavy: breaking flow, switching windows, loading web apps, waiting for flagship reasoning, copying results, and switching back.

SpotAsk exists to make lightweight questions genuinely lightweight. This page explains the ideas behind that goal and the tradeoffs they imply.

Questions first, tools second

A common experience: you have a question, and before you can ask it you first decide where to ask it. By the time you have chosen a platform and clicked through to it, the original question is half forgotten.

SpotAsk flips the order. You write the question down first — in a window that is always one hotkey away — and only then decide who answers it:

• Ask the configured model directly with streaming answers (BYOK).
• Use External Ask to route queries to web platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok), local CLI agents, or desktop apps. The question is captured the moment it appears; who answers it can wait.

Lightweight by intention

SpotAsk deliberately does not try to be an all-in-one AI workspace. Tasks that need multi-step reasoning, long context, repeated debugging, or multi-turn retrieval are better served by dedicated tools — and External Ask is the bridge to them.

Staying narrow is what keeps the app fast:

• Pure Swift & AppKit — installer is ~10 MB with zero Electron or Chromium runtime.
• It lives quietly in the menu bar and stays out of the way until summoned.
• Closing the window (Esc) ends the interaction completely — no tabs, no inbox, nothing calling you back.

The goal is that after you close the window, it is as if SpotAsk never appeared: you are simply back in your original context with an answer.

Keyboard-first, zero pointer travel

Most SpotAsk workflows never require touching the mouse: summon the window, pick a prompt, copy the reply, and dismiss with ⎋. Looking up an unfamiliar term takes just a few keystrokes from start to finish.

Every shortcut is configurable, so the app adapts to your hands rather than the other way around.

Text in place

Good questions often start from text that is already on screen. Instead of copy-pasting into a separate app, SpotAsk works where the text is: select a paragraph in Safari, Notes, Mail, or any other app, and translate, explain, summarize, or polish it in place. The answer can replace the original selection, go to the clipboard, or open as a conversation for follow-up questions.

Custom prompts turn your own repeated text tasks into the same one-step operation.

Your keys, your Mac

SpotAsk follows the BYOK model — bring your own key. It connects to OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic services that you choose, and:

• Service addresses and access keys are stored only on this Mac, in the system Keychain.
• Nothing is sent anywhere except the API provider you configured.
• There is no account system, no telemetry backend, and no SpotAsk server in the middle.

Details live in Privacy & Local Data.

Native and small, like Spotlight

The name comes from Spotlight: the press-a-few-keys-and-done interaction model, applied to one specific job — asking questions. Where heavier tools feel oversized for such a small need, SpotAsk aims for a native, lighter, purer experience — a menu-bar utility that does one small thing quickly, and then gets out of the way.

Keywords

quick questions · selection assistant · external ask · keyboard-first · BYOK · local-only privacy · lightweight and native · done and gone

Where to go next

• Getting Started — install and ask your first question.
• Explore SpotAsk — the full capability map.
• External Ask — route questions to other AI platforms.
• Selection Assistant — work with text in other apps.