Get K.ai

Mac release notes

1.6.0

• Only the notes a question needs ride along. Each answer says how many of your notes it used; click the line to see which.
• K.ai noticed. When something in a conversation is worth keeping, K.ai offers a note with Keep or Not now.
• Earlier conversations come back. When a question needs them, excerpts from earlier conversations on this Mac ride along.
• Spoken answers never read citations. Conversation mode and Speak Selection skip citation marks, source lists and links; after a spoken answer K.ai says what Memory did, and a spoken yes answers the card's question.
• A shorter note waits for you. A request that would drop lines of a note asks for Keep first, unless you asked to remove something.

1.5.0

• Options as one comparison card. When K.ai edits your photo into several options, the pictures stack into one card, each panel named by its caption. Click a panel to see it full size; Save comparison… and Share comparison keep the whole card as one picture.
• Captions that name the condition. Each picture's caption names the option and the one thing that matters for it, and the options come from the list or thread you sent.

1.4.1

• Select any text in an answer. Select Text, beside Copy, opens the answer where any run of words can be selected with the keyboard or the mouse and copied or shared. Copy Answer still copies the whole answer.
• Reading is not interrupted. While an answer is still arriving, the window no longer pulls you to the end once you have scrolled up to read, by trackpad, wheel or keys. Scroll back to the end, or click the arrow, and it follows again.

1.4.0

• Eight voices. Pick a British, American, Australian or African American voice, a woman or a man of each: Charlotte, Oliver, Emily, Michael, Matilda, Jack, Simone or Marcus, under Settings, Voice. Pick one to hear it. Every voice is warmer and clearer than before and stays the same from the first word to the last; the voice you chose before is kept on its nearest new voice.
• Pictures you can keep. Click a picture in an answer to see it full size. Pinch or double-click to zoom, page between pictures with the arrow keys, and save it with Save… or share it.

1.3.1

• One voice, even when the audio engine fails. If this Mac's audio engine stops mid-answer, the rest of the spoken answer is read by this Mac's voice, the strip says why, and nothing more is fetched. Before, every remaining sentence was fetched, failed, and rang the "your turn" tone again.

1.3.0

• Memory. Ask K.ai to remember a list, a date or a fact and it becomes a note: a plain Markdown file in the app, or in a folder you link under Settings, Memory, so your notes are yours to open, sync and back up. Ask about it later and K.ai reads your notes to answer. The sidebar gains a Chats | Memory switch (⌘⇧M) with a reader, an editor, Share, and an "Ask about this note" composer. Memory can be locked with Touch ID, and every note leaves as a file: copy them to a folder, save a zip, or import Markdown files.
• About me. The hidden note this Mac used to send with every question is now a visible note called About me, yours to read and edit.
• No more scope picker. K.ai decides what each question needs. The Global, Local and Local + global choice is gone.
• One voice per answer. A spoken answer stays in K.ai's voice from the first word to the last. If K.ai's voice cannot be reached, this Mac's voice finishes the answer and the strip says so. A short chime tells you a conversation is open, and headings, bullets, tables and code are no longer read aloud as symbols.

1.2.1

• Repositories, read the way git reads them. A linked folder's own .gitignore rules are honored, at any depth and with git's semantics, along with .git/info/exclude. Generated bundles, build output and vendored trees stop being indexed and stop competing with the files that produced them, and editing an ignore file reconciles the files it governs right away.
• A folder that is a repository says so. Its row under Settings, External Brain reads Repository and the branch it is on, read from HEAD and nothing else under .git. Nothing new leaves the Mac and there is no new switch.

1.2.0

• The External Brain can hear. Turn on Transcribe audio in linked folders, on this Mac under Settings, External Brain, and recordings in a linked folder (mp3, m4a, wav, mp4 and the other formats this Mac decodes) become searchable transcripts with time anchors. A source pill names the recording and the minute. Off by default.
• On this Mac, resumable. Transcription uses the same local model as On this Mac dictation, ten minutes at a time, checkpointed as it goes: quitting during a long lecture costs at most the window in flight. It pauses while the Mac is hot or low on battery and picks up when that clears. Dictation always wins the model.
• An honest permission prompt. Mac dictation's Speech permission request now carries a description; it was missing. If macOS asks again, that is why.
• Setup you can cancel. Preparing the local model shows Cancel Setup, and a busy model is waited out rather than reported as a failure.

1.1.1

• A long chat now opens at its last message. In 1.1.0, a long chat could open on an empty screen with a down arrow.
• The down arrow now always moves the chat to its last message.

1.1.0

• A first take, right away. On questions that take K.ai a while to think through, a short first answer appears within about a second and the full answer streams in beneath it. The first take is labeled, never saved, and never spoken.
• Leaving never loses an answer. An answer you started finishes on K.ai's side no matter what the Mac does; if the connection drops, the app reconnects on its own and picks up where it left off instead of asking you to regenerate.
• Sending is safe to retry. A question sent over a flaky connection is re-sent, never re-asked, so it can never be charged twice.
• The Mac sleeps normally. A waiting answer no longer keeps the machine awake.
• Transcriptions and meetings finish. Transcribing an attached recording continues if you close the chat, and a meeting keeps recording if you dismiss its window; both land in the chat they started from.

1.0.12

• Removing a linked device is final. When you remove a phone, its keys and any account key it handed to this Mac are erased right away, and the removal holds even if a disk write fails part way through. A removed phone can never quietly come back.
• Account hand-off is steadier. A newly paired phone now has a longer, more reliable window to finish handing its account key to this Mac, so the transfer completes cleanly over a shaky connection.
• A full wipe leaves nothing behind. "Delete all local K.ai data" now also clears the account keys of linked devices.
• The K.ai Link record heals itself. A damaged Link activity file is set aside and recording continues, instead of stopping without notice.

1.0.9

• Pairing reliability. Fixed a rare case where a large encrypted frame sent while pairing with a phone could exceed the transport size limit and fail. The limit now reserves room for the encryption overhead, so every sealed frame the phone receives opens.

1.0.8

• Top Up key. The account key screen shows your Top Up key first. Copy it, then add credit from any device. The Top Up key can only add credit. It cannot spend your balance, read your conversations, or move your account.
• Add credit faster. The account screen has a Top up button. It opens the top-up page in one step.
• Read aloud and voice. Read aloud and voice mode no longer take the microphone from each other. The keyboard dictation microphone works again after you use read aloud.

1.0.7

• Account key screen. The account key screen shows a new message. The message tells you that your key keeps your credits, but not your words. Your conversations stay on this Mac.
• Corrections. The label for the attached picture is now more clear. You cannot send a message that contains only a line break. The low-balance message always shows the most recent value from the server.

1.0.6

• Low-balance message. K.ai shows a message when your balance goes below one dollar. The message has a top-up button. K.ai removes the message when you add credit.

Previous release: 1.4.0 · manifest · signature

All Mac version changes →

K.ai Terminal Beta

Kai where you already work. kai opens a session — say what you want in plain language and it does it, telling you the command it ran and asking before it changes anything; kai chat --agent adds a streamed chat with file and shell tools that each ask before running. A daemon indexes the folders you point it at — an Obsidian vault, an org-mode tree, any folder of open files — into a private index that never leaves your machine, and every answer can draw on it. A phone can pair with the machine over K.ai Link. macOS and any Linux distribution; no GUI required, ever.

Install with one command

curl -fsSL https://usek.ai/install.sh | sh

The script detects your platform, downloads the signed release, verifies the SHA-256 (and the PGP-signed manifest when gpg is installed), and installs user-level: binaries in ~/.local/bin, the daemon as a systemd user unit on Linux or a launchd agent on macOS. No root, ever — read it first if you like.

Or install by hand

• Mac (universal): kai-0.2.0-beta.5-darwin-universal.tar.gz
• Linux x86_64: kai-0.2.0-beta.5-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
• Linux ARM64: kai-0.2.0-beta.5-linux-aarch64.tar.gz
• Manifest: manifest · signature

The Linux binaries are static — no runtime to install, any distribution. Verify the same way as the Mac release (shasum -a 256 --ignore-missing -c on a Mac):

gpg --import kai-release-public-key.asc
gpg --verify kai-0.2.0-beta.5-manifest.txt.asc kai-0.2.0-beta.5-manifest.txt
sha256sum --ignore-missing -c kai-0.2.0-beta.5-manifest.txt

The manifest lists every platform, so --ignore-missing checks the one you downloaded. Without it, the checker reports the other files as FAILED open or read and exits non-zero on a good download.

tar -xzf kai-0.2.0-beta.5-darwin-universal.tar.gz
cd kai-0.2.0-beta.5-darwin-universal
./install.sh

Talk

kai brain add ~/notes --name "Notes"
kai                                  # the session — multi-turn, streamed
kai chat --agent                     # tools: read, write, run — each approved by you
kai "what did I decide about the greenhouse fans?"
kai query "greenhouse fans"          # local search only — works offline

Chat needs an API key: open web chat, tap the identity chip → API keys, mint one, then run kai login and paste it. Answers stream into the terminal with their citations and exactly what each one cost; kai balance shows the balance as of the last answer (live balance at usek.ai).

Without the daemon everything still works — kai brain add indexes one-shot and kai query reads the index directly. With it running, linked folders stay fresh as you edit. kai help lists every command.

Where things live

The index is ~/.local/share/kai and never leaves this machine. The grant list is a readable file, ~/.config/kai/brains.toml — inspectable, diffable, easy to carry to a new machine. Your API key sits in ~/.config/kai/config.toml, mode 600; kai logout removes it. Linked folders are read-only to Kai, and kai brain remove deletes that folder's index — never your files. On a Mac, the terminal keeps its own index in those same paths — separate from the K.ai app's External Brain, so neither can surprise the other.

What the beta is: lexical retrieval (SQLite FTS5) over the same index schema as the Mac's External Brain, with the notes-relationship graph; Markdown, org, plain text, CSV/JSON, and code. kai query never touches the network, and agent tools run only after you approve each kind. Pairing a phone to the machine (K.ai Link) is in this release. PDFs and on-device dense vectors are the next steps — and honestly listed as not in this beta.

iPhone, Android, and the web

Android 1.5.3 — get it on Google Play, or on Zapstore, the Nostr-native app store with in-app Lightning top-ups. Documents, voice conversations, and Kai Lens on both.

Web — web chat works in any browser with the same account key.

iPhone and iPad 1.4.4 — download on the App Store.