Gobbl questions, answered

Yes. Gobbl is free and open source under the MIT license, made by Xeve. The AI features (writing with the Gobbl key, chat, briefs, Polish with AI, Memory's to-dos) are free during the beta and will become a paid plan later. The notch, the pet, the shelf, the clipboard and on-device dictation don't use the AI service at all.

Any Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Macs without a notch, and external displays, get a small pill at the top of the screen instead. Dictation needs a Mac with Apple silicon. There is no Windows or Linux version.

Now. Download Gobbl for macOS 14 or later: it's signed and notarized by Apple, and it updates itself. Every build is also on GitHub releases, and you can build it from source.

No. There's no sign-up. To stop abuse of the free AI service, the app does a one-time Cloudflare Turnstile check the first time you use an AI feature.

No. At rest Gobbl sits around 0% CPU: Gob only redraws to blink, and nothing polls in the background except a cheap clipboard check.

Yes, all of it, under the MIT license on GitHub. Gobbl doesn't reuse code from GPL notch apps; third-party code it does use is listed in the repo.

Hold files on a drag-and-drop shelf (with convert, compress, background removal, text copy and zip), keep your clipboard history on ⇧⌘Space, show Now Playing with lyrics, replace the volume, brightness and Caps Lock pop-ups, show your next meeting with a Join button, and run a focus timer, keep-awake and other quick tools. See all features.

Gob is the pet: a small retro computer with a face on its screen, in three models (Classic, Compact and Candy). It watches your cursor, eats the files you drop, dances to music, types along with you, fills its screen with Matrix rain while your AI agent codes, and levels up with streaks and hats. New pets arrive in a box.

Yes. Skins are small .gobskin files you can make, share and import. You can also record a 6-second clip of your pet as MP4 and GIF.

The right Option key. Tap it in any text field to write or rewrite, double-tap for edit mode with versions like "shorter" or "friendlier", hold it to dictate, and type /g with a question, then tap it, to get an answer in place.

No. Dictation runs OpenAI's Whisper model on your Mac, so audio never leaves it. Only if you choose the Polish with AI clean-up level is the transcribed text (never the audio) sent for polishing. More on the dictation page.

No. There's no word cap and no account, because transcription happens on your Mac.

For dictation on a Mac, yes: it's free, has no word cap and runs on-device. Wispr Flow is cloud-based, works on more platforms and costs $15 a month for Pro. See Gobbl vs Wispr Flow.

Memory is an opt-in beta. When it's on, it reads the text of the window in front of you through macOS Accessibility. It never takes screenshots. It stores that text on your Mac only, masks secrets, and skips password fields, private browser windows and banking sites. See Memory.

Only what an AI feature needs: the text you ask it to write or rewrite with some nearby context, your chat messages, and, if Memory is on, short snippets used to find to-dos and build digests. Requests go through Xeve's service to a provider that doesn't keep data, and every request is logged on your Mac so you can check. See Privacy.

Yes. You can pause it, forget a recent stretch of time, forget one app, or delete everything. A small indicator in the notch shows when Memory is on.

No. The Gobbl app has no analytics. This website uses Google Analytics to count visits.

Clicking Connect in Gobbl's settings adds a small hook to Claude Code's settings (backed up first). Events go to Gobbl over a private socket on your Mac. If Gobbl isn't running, or you don't answer a prompt within 30 seconds, Claude asks in the terminal as usual.

Yes, for status: Gob works along while Codex runs and celebrates when it's done. Allow and Deny from the notch is for Claude Code.

Part of the Memory beta. One switch in Settings, AI Agents ("Connect AI apps automatically") registers Gobbl's MCP helper with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex (which also covers the ChatGPT desktop app), Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, LM Studio and Zed. Those apps can search your memory, read a day, list to-dos and look up people and projects; through the running app they can also read the clipboard, add a reminder or mark a to-do done. Answers cite their sources, and each call is logged on your Mac by tool name and time only. Any other MCP app can use the copyable command.