About Homebird
We build fully private, on-device AI software that doesn't collect any data.
What Homebird is
Homebird is a Mac app that installs, runs and updates AI programs. There are three so far: zwisp for dictation, zchat for chat and zmeet for meeting notes. Everything runs on your Mac, including the AI models. Nothing you say, type or record is sent anywhere.
Before it installs anything, Homebird checks that the download is complete and signed by us. Then it keeps each program up to date.
Why the programs need it
AI models are big. Whisper, which turns speech into text, takes about 1.5 GB of memory. Qwen, the language model that tidies dictation, answers chats and writes meeting summaries, takes about 2.3 GB. If every program loaded its own copies, a 16 GB Mac would run out of room after two or three of them.
Homebird avoids that by running the models for all of them:
- Whisper is loaded once, inside Homebird. Every program that needs speech, like zwisp and zmeet, sends it audio and gets text back.
- Qwen is one file, shared. Each program gets its own small Qwen server, set up for its job, and Homebird runs them all. Because they all read the same model file, macOS keeps a single copy of the weights in memory.
- Homebird decides whose turn it is. The Mac's GPU does one job at a time well, so Homebird hands it out. Dictation goes first, because you're waiting for it. A chat reply pauses for a moment while your dictation is cleaned up, then carries on. Meeting summaries wait until the GPU is free.
So your Mac holds one or two models however many programs use them. A new program adds its own features and some working memory, not another few gigabytes of model. Three programs are only the start. Because they share what's already loaded, the same one or two models can power dozens of Homebird programs.
How it fits together
You don't need to open Homebird to use the programs. When one starts, it opens Homebird in the background, with no window and no Dock icon, and connects to it. If Homebird isn't installed, the program tells you and links to the download. Servers nobody is using are stopped, and one that crashes is restarted.
When you do open Homebird, its Active page shows what each program is using: the app itself, its share of the models, and the memory Whisper uses on the Neural Engine. Activity Monitor leaves some of that out. A shared model is counted once, so you can see how much room is left.
Qwen comes in two sizes. Small (Qwen3 4B) works on every Apple Silicon Mac. Large (Qwen3 14B, a 9 GB download) is offered on Macs with 24 GB of memory or more. Pick one in Homebird's Settings and every program switches to it.