Arc

Arc is a free AI assistant app that runs on the screen you are already looking at. On Android it appears as a floating sidebar over every app, and on Mac it is a panel you open with Control+Space over any window. Rather than asking you to describe your situation, Arc reads the current screen and acts on it: it can summarize, read aloud, rewrite, chat about, and extract information from whatever is in front of you. It is built for people who want AI help inside the apps they already use, without leaving what they are doing or explaining their context from scratch. The starting point for Arc is a simple observation: chatbots make you bring the screen to them. To get help with a document, message, or article inside a traditional chatbot, you typically select the text, copy it, open the AI app, paste it, explain what you want, and then copy the answer back — five steps across two apps, with the context lost along the way. Arc is positioned as already being on the screen instead. It is designed so that the same task becomes a single step: summon Arc over whatever you are doing, pick an action, and use the result in place. That difference matters most in the apps where work actually happens — email, chat, documents, and browsers — where switching away breaks focus and forces you to re-establish context. The AI Summary and Reader feature turns articles, PDFs, long emails, and threads into numbered key points, with an auto-detected title and source shown alongside the result. Because Arc is reading the screen rather than receiving pasted text, it already knows what the points are about, and you can ask follow-up questions about the same page without re-explaining the context. The summary panel itself offers Listen, Copy, and Save actions, so a summary can be read aloud, copied out, or kept for later. Arc can also explain or translate content in more than ten languages, which makes the same feature useful for understanding material written in a language you do not read fluently. AI Writer works inside the text box you are already using. It can rewrite text in any tone, fix grammar, draft a reply, or turn notes into a post, and then insert the result directly back into the focused field — Gmail, WhatsApp, Slack, or anything else with a text field — so nothing has to be copied or pasted. Alongside writing, AI Read provides natural text-to-speech with automatic language detection. You can have any screen read aloud, one tap from any app, whether you are listening to articles, documents, and messages while commuting, cooking, or resting your eyes. The feature is described as built with accessibility in mind, and it runs from the floating sidebar rather than from a separate reader application. Smart Extract pulls structured details out of a screen in a single pass: dates, contacts, links, phone numbers, addresses, meeting times, and tracking codes. There is nothing to select or highlight first, and each extracted item can be copied with a single tap. Chat with any screen lets you ask questions about the document in front of you with its context already loaded, so you can get clarifications or explore a topic further without pasting anything. Results and summaries can be saved to a library, with optional Google Drive backup, and saved items follow you across platforms. Related actions include an AI Note Taker for call transcripts, summaries, and action items, and an AI Reply Generator that produces context-aware replies for chats and email in your tone. Custom Actions let you write a prompt once and save it as a one-tap action that can be run on any screen. Any action can be bound to a global hotkey, so a frequently used prompt becomes as quick to trigger as a keyboard shortcut. Beyond your own prompts, Arc ships with access to a community library of more than 500 ready-made actions built and shared by other users for work, study, writing, and research. You can filter that library by category and language, add an action to your sidebar with a tap, and share your own actions back with the community. The same library is described as free to install. Arc also turns reading into remembering. The Flashcards feature generates a flashcard deck from whatever is on your screen — a page, lecture notes, or a paper — and lets you review it inside Arc using a question-and-answer review mode. Decks are saved to your library and follow you across devices, so study material created on one screen can be reviewed on another. Combined with AI Summary and AI Note Taker, this gives students a workflow where the same screen content that was summarized or transcribed can then be converted into review material. Using Arc is designed to take about three seconds from question to answer. On Mac you press Control+Space; on Android you tap the floating Arc bubble; either way the assistant opens over whatever you are doing. You then pick an action — summarize, read aloud, write, chat, extract, or one of your own custom actions — or simply type a prompt into the actions and prompt field. The result can be inserted into the field you were typing in, listened to, copied, or saved to your library. Pressing Esc returns you to work, and because Arc is summoned rather than running in the background, nothing happens until you ask. Arc is available on Android and Mac. The Android app is a floating sidebar over every app with every Arc feature, distributed through Google Play, and the Mac app is a Control+Space panel over any window that is notarized by Apple and requires macOS 14.0 or later on Apple Silicon or Intel. A Windows version with Ctrl+Space is in beta, and an iPhone version is in development. The free plan costs $0 forever on every platform and includes 7 requests per week on basic features, no ads, and no trial countdown, and you can use it as a guest without an account. A Premium plan for power users is unlimited and priced in your local currency inside the app; it covers unlimited AI summaries, unlimited text-to-speech, AI chat about any screen, workflow automation and custom actions, and one subscription covers every platform. Google Play shows a 4.6-star rating. Privacy is treated as a core part of the design, because an assistant that sees your screen has to earn trust. Arc is on-demand by design: there is no background monitoring and no keylogging, and it reads the screen when you run an action and not otherwise. Screenshots require explicit permission and are only taken when you initiate an action that needs them. Arc automatically disables itself in nearly 400 sensitive apps, including banking, crypto, and password-manager apps, and you can add your own exclusions. Screen content is processed to produce the answer and then discarded rather than stored on Arc's servers, and saved items stay on your device unless you turn on Google Drive backup. Arc works on top of the apps you already use and any other app that shows text. The site lists Chrome, Safari, Gmail, WhatsApp, Slack, Notion, Mail, Preview, Obsidian, Reddit, and LinkedIn among the applications it works over, and the FAQ states that Arc works with virtually any app, subject to the sensitive-app exclusions. Because it operates at the screen level instead of through per-app integrations, there is nothing to connect or configure before using it in a new application, and the same actions are available wherever text appears. Arc suits anyone who reads, writes, or studies on a screen: people handling long email threads and documents, students turning lecture notes into flashcards, users who want text read aloud, and anyone who wants to automate repetitive steps across apps through reusable actions. Its promise is straightforward — an AI assistant that already knows what is on your screen, so the work of summarizing, rewriting, listening, extracting, and automating happens where you already are, on Android and Mac, free to start.