Hidden from screen capture
PrivacymacOS excludes the overlay from capture, and auto-hides it when a meeting app is frontmost. Recordings and shared screens stay clean.
A private AI overlay for live calls
See everything.Show nothing.
Ghostbar hears the conversation, reads what's on your screen, and streams the answer in a quiet overlay — one that stays off the screen recording on macOS.
Free account, then one Terminal command. About a minute.
Official downloads · No credit card · Install guide
Answer
The whole point
Same second. Two very different frames.
On macOS the overlay is excluded from screen capture, and auto-hides when a meeting app comes to the front. You read the answer. The recording never had it.
You see the question, the answer, and the transcript.
Zoom, Teams, and Meet capture the call — and nothing else.
How it works
Three keys, start to answer
From invisible to answering in seconds — without leaving the call you're on.
- 01⌘⇧O
Summon the bar
A global shortcut drops a compact command bar onto any screen. It runs from the tray — no Dock icon, no taskbar window.
- 02Ask
Ask, analyze, or listen
Type a question, box a region of the screen for a vision model, or turn on live transcription to catch every question as it's asked.
- 03⌘⇧Esc
Read it, then vanish
Answers stream into the overlay while it stays excluded from screen capture. One shortcut wipes it and every answer with it.
Features
Quiet by default, useful on demand
Everything the overlay does — capture, vision, transcription, and privacy — in one bar you control with a keystroke.
No Dock or taskbar footprint
PrivacyRuns from the system tray only — no Dock icon, no taskbar window. The overlay is there when you summon it and gone when you don't.
Live transcription
AudioCapture system audio during a call. Every question lands in the sidebar so you can ask a follow-up straight from the caption.
Analyze any screen region
VisionBox a diagram, a slide, an error, or a block of code — a vision model reads exactly what you selected and answers in seconds.
Panic hide in one shortcut
SafetyCmd/Ctrl+Shift+Esc wipes the overlay and clears every answer instantly — for the moment you need the screen to be just the screen.
Session context built in
ContextDrop your notes and CV into Settings and answers ground themselves in your material — so they sound like you, not a generic chatbot.
Compatibility
Verified against the apps you actually call on
Two macOS generations, two different mechanisms, one result. Every release is re-tested against the video apps below.
Read the platform matrixmacOS 14 and earlier
Capture exclusionThe window is marked non-capturable at the OS level, so recorders and shared screens never receive its pixels.
- Zoom
- Microsoft Teams
- Google Meet
macOS 15 and later
Automatic hideScreenCaptureKit changed what exclusion can promise, so Ghostbar hides itself the moment a meeting app comes to the front.
- Zoom
- Teams
- Google Meet
- Chrome
Before you install
The questions worth asking
- Does Ghostbar really stay hidden while I share my screen?
- Ghostbar asks macOS to exclude its overlay window from screen capture, which is the same mechanism password managers use. In practice that means it does not appear in Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or other apps that capture through the standard OS APIs. It is best-effort, not a guarantee: a camera pointed at your screen, a hardware capture device, or some remote-desktop and recording tools can still see it. Treat it as designed to stay out of a normal screen share, not as something that cannot be seen under any circumstances.
- Do you record or store my calls?
- No. Audio is transcribed so the model can use it and is not retained as a recording. Screenshots are sent only when you explicitly trigger Analyze Screen, and are used to answer that one question. We store your account, your billing status, and token usage counts — not the contents of your conversations.
- Where does my audio and screen data actually go?
- To Ghostbar's API, which forwards the request to the model provider (OpenAI or Anthropic, depending on the model you pick) and streams the answer back. Nothing is sent anywhere until you ask a question or start a transcript.
- Do I need an account to download it?
- Yes — a free account with a verified email. It takes about a minute, and the desktop app needs you signed in anyway, so doing it first means the install finishes ready to use. No card required to download or to run the free trial.
- Is it free?
- There is a free 15-minute trial session on every new account, with no card required. After that you can buy a single day for a one-off price, or take a monthly plan. Pricing is shown in INR or USD depending on where you are.
In practice
What people use it for
Meetings, without a bot in the room
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Install takes about a minute — a free account, then one Terminal command. The 15-minute trial starts when you first open the overlay, not before.
Free account, then one Terminal command. About a minute.