Quick Start

Fluent is best described by its users as the simplest AI assistant for your Mac. It's a lightweight Spotlight-like context-aware AI companion that works on top of virtually any Mac app. Supercharged with MCP & RAG – a fully local, private Knowledge Base.

Key Features

• Native macOS app
• Quickly accessible in any app
• Lightweight, energy-efficient
• Global context-awareness
• Custom actions for repetitive tasks
• Selected text formatting persistence
• Automation features
• BYOK (Bring Your Own API Key)
• Can run fully offline (with local models)
• 500+ models supported
• 10 built-in MCP integrations and a directory of nearly 7,000 external MCP servers
• Built-in hybrid RAG (Knowledge Base) engine

How It Works

• You can call Fluent's floating panel (Smart Panel) with a globally assigned shortcut, to execute custom actions, or custom AI prompt
• Depending on whether you had text selected, file or picture attached, and context enabled, you can instantly run the action with those right there in the context
• AI model of your choice, be it cloud or local one, will process all the context attached along with your request

Depending on your task, Fluent will act either as a quick AI chatbot that answers your questions, writing assistant that refines your texts, or intelligent AI agent that executes complex tasks on your Mac.

Installation

Download latest version of Fluent from our official website by clicking on button in the top-right corner of this webpage.

Open the dmg file and move Fluent into the Applications folder. That's it!

Onboarding

In the first onboarding step you're offered to tweak Smart Panel appearance. Here you can change the color theme, font family, and size. There will be more visual tweaks available in the Settings, such as Liquid Glass, monochrome action icons, etc.

Smart Panel Mode

Here you can choose the desired Smart Panel Mode. There are two modes:

• Follow Mouse. This mode opens the Smart Panel right above your mouse pointer, whenever it is. This is the default mode.
• Spotlight. If you like to see Fluent at exactly the same position it each time you open the Smart Panel, choose this mode. This is similar to how Spotlight, Alfred, Raycast, etc. work.

Accessibility Permissions

Fluent needs Accessibility permissions in order to react on hotkeys you press and see the text you select, or context you attach. Open your macOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, and enable Fluent in the app list. Restart Fluent after that.

This is the only core permission. Fluent will ask you for the necessary permissions along the work, only if it needs to. Some of such permission are:

• Automation. To allow Fluent interact with browsers, Notes, Calendar, Reminders, etc.
• Mail. Fluent integrates with native Mail app directly in such a way that it needs to access it's underlying storage. This allows for ultra-fast thread aggregations in huge mailboxes (hundreds of thousands of letters).
• Location. Only when using Location integration.

Cloud Models

Here you are offered to set up the API keys for the cloud providers. Besides OpenAI, Google and OpenRouter, here are the other cloud providers also supported by Fluent natively:

• Anthropic
• Grok (xAI)
• Mistral
• Perplexity
• Straico
• Apple Intelligence

Fluent also supports adding custom providers that are OpenAI-compatible. Among those are: LM Studio, Ollama, Groq, Cerebras, DeepSeek, Qwen (Alibaba), Inception, Poe, Open WebUI and many others.

Local Models

Fluent natively supports local MLX models. There is more than a hundred of models pre-supplied with Fluent (you would still have to download them). Models are downloaded from Hugging Face. You can also download the model files manually and load from the disk into Fluent.

Of course, Ollama and LM Studio are also supported as custom providers.

Finish Setup

In the last step you're offered to assign a global shortcut with which you call Fluent's Smart Panel, and select your native language, which will be used for translation actions, and to let AI better know what language to speak with you.

Privacy Basics

• Fluent does not collect, process or store any of your data, even telemetry
• API keys for AI providers are stored securely in your macOS Keychain
• History is encrypted and stored on disk, and can be disabled or pruned by age
• Memory files are stored on disk without duplication, non-encrypted by design
• Images generated with Fluent are stored on disk, non-encrypted
• You can blacklist applications to prevent Fluent activation while using them