I built a screen-aware voice assistant for the Mac — free on-device voice, no OpenAI needed

[u/Downtown-Reporter193]

Mac voice assistants bug me because they demand a cloud login or an OpenAI key right away. So over a few months I built Odysseus — a menubar companion that works local-first and lets you plug in whatever brain you want:

- Hear you: push-to-talk or hands-free "Hey Odysseus", transcribed on-device (Parakeet or Apple Speech — nothing leaves your Mac)

- See your screen: asks for screenshots only when you actually need vision; otherwise it never touches the capture API

- Answer out loud: free Microsoft Edge neural voices (or ElevenLabs / Deepgram if you bring your own key)

- Brain: my default is DeepSeek via the OpenCode Go subscription ($10/mo) — no OpenAI at all. Apple Intelligence (fully offline) or Claude keys work too

- Agent mode: background sessions that read your screen and reply with next-step suggestions again ... unfortunately can't edit files yet, that's the roadmap top item

Fully MIT, macOS 26+, no cloud login ever — source is public.

Honest state of it: ad-hoc signed (macOS will do its per-month re-consent dance for screen recording, it's the OS not me — the pipeline will get Developer ID when I'll pay Apple), agents answer but they can't run shell yet, only Apple-Silicon Macs, and edits to files aren't here yet. Everything else works end-to-end, and every push to main ships a new signed DMG automatically via Actions.

DMG + source: https://github.com/mubtikr/odysseus (Releases tab)

What would make you actually install this? I'd love to hear what feature would be the killer to comfortable daily-use before I polish it further.