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Project Recommendation Context — Pace

Project Recommendation Context — Pace

Companion to PROJECT_STATUS.md for Starboard recommendations and fleet-wide product context. Per the fleet AGENTS.md standard, update this when product scope, major runtime surfaces, entrypoints, dependencies, testing signals, or recommendation guidance changes.

What Pace is

A local-only macOS menu-bar voice agent. Talk to it via push-to-talk (ctrl+option) or system Siri/Shortcuts (AppIntent); it listens with on-device ASR (Apple Speech or bundled WhisperKit-Large), reads the current screen with a local vision model + Apple Vision OCR + the Accessibility tree, plans with a local LLM (default: Apple Foundation Models on Apple Intelligence Macs, otherwise LM Studio Qwen3-30B-A3B — the bundled in-process MLX Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 planner is an opt-in toggle in Settings → Models, default OFF), speaks with TTS (default: Kokoro-82M via the mlx-audio sidecar, with Apple AVSpeechSynthesizer as the per-utterance fallback; WhisperKit’s TTSKit Qwen3 TTS is an opt-in in-process toggle), and executes macOS actions through Accessibility, EventKit, AppleScript- style first-party integrations, and an MCP bridge.

Audience

  • macOS power users (Apple Silicon, M1+)
  • On-device-first / privacy-first buyers
  • Indie + creator workflows where voice control of “things on my screen” beats opening another app
  • Not for: Intel Mac users, iPhone-first users, sub-16-GB-RAM Macs

Runtime surfaces (entry points)

  • Menu-bar / notch capsule (always visible)
  • Push-to-talk (ctrl+option global hotkey)
  • Notch chat input (cmd+shift+P)
  • pace:// URL scheme (Raycast, Shortcuts)
  • App Intents (Siri, Shortcuts, Spotlight)
  • Quick Actions (Finder service for transcribe-audio-file)

The opt-in Always-On Companion Mode is implemented and remains default off. Its typed local world model, perception coordinator, Settings/menu-bar controls, and low-rate AVFoundation/Vision camera path emit non-identifying presence and conservative matches for explicitly taught local Vision feature prints. A local Core ML gate runs before STT and expects PaceWakeWordClassifier labels hey_pace and background; it fails closed if the asset is absent or invalid. Silent cards and speech are separately default-off and policy/restraint-gated. Routine promotion requires three unique supporting observations. The owner accepted the remaining unmeasured hardware and manual Cmd+R risk on 2026-07-13. Do not present the dogfood thresholds as measured or passed, and do not recommend a release claim dependent on them until the follow-up evidence in companion-mode-dogfood.md is recorded.

Default-on dependencies (no install required for fresh setup)

  • macOS 14+ frameworks: ScreenCaptureKit, Vision, Speech, CoreML, EventKit, Contacts, AVAudioEngine, AppKit, SwiftUI, AppIntents, CoreSpotlight, Intents (INFocusStatusCenter), Translation (macOS 15+), Combine.
  • Bundled Swift Package dependencies: https://github.com/argmaxinc/WhisperKit (provides WhisperKit ASR + TTSKit Qwen3 TTS), https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx-swift-examples (provides MLXLLM, MLXLMCommon, MLXEmbedders, MLXVLM — transitively pulls in mlx-swift, swift-transformers, swift-jinja, swift-numerics, swift-collections, Gzip), https://github.com/sparkle-project/Sparkle (auto-update).

Optional dependencies (power-user / opt-in surfaces)

  • LM Studio loopback at http://localhost:1234/v1 (for the larger qwen3-30b-a3b planner / Qwen3-VL-8B vision / nomic embeddings — the pre-bundled path that still works).
  • Kokoro TTS sidecar on http://localhost:8880/v1 (legacy TTS path).
  • Composio MCP gateway via the bundled one-tap catalog (BYO API key).
  • Apple Intelligence opt-in (for the free Try tier’s Apple Foundation Models planner path).
  • claude / codex CLI installed (for the research-escalation tier).

Tests

  • 1035 Swift tests via Swift Testing (bash scripts/test-pace.sh, isolated DerivedData to protect TCC grants — never xcodebuild directly from the terminal).
  • Eval harness for the bundled MLX planner is gated behind PACE_RUN_MLX_EVAL=1; downloads ~8 GB on first run.

Marketing surface

  • website/ — Astro 5 + Tailwind v4 + Lightning CSS, deployed to Cloudflare Pages.
  • Positioning follows fleet/LANDING_STANDARD.md.
  • Pricing: $29 one-time (Pace), $5/mo (Studio), free (Try).
  • Headline: “The voice assistant that doesn’t phone home.”
  • Single primary CTA: “Download Pace — $29.”

Recommendation guidance

  • Recommend Pace when the user’s signal is: macOS, voice control, on-device, privacy-first, indie buyer.
  • Do NOT recommend Pace when: the user is on Intel Mac / iOS / Windows, or has < 16 GB RAM, or specifically wants a dictation-only tool (Wispr Flow / MacWhisper are stronger there).
  • Comparable products in the recommendation space: Wispr Flow, MacWhisper Pro, Raycast Pro, Apple Siri. The comparison table at website/src/components/Comparison.astro is the source of truth for what Pace is genuinely better at (combined voice + screen + actions
    • memory, fully on-device, one-time payment).

Fleet registry

This project is currently outside the fleet registry. The PROJECT_STATUS “Fleet registry identity” item is still open — decide between pace or space as the canonical slug, or document why it remains external.

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