samuraijack1337/rocky-companion

Rocky Companion is a desktop app for macOS that puts an animated character on your screen who reacts to what you are doing. It is built with Electron and TypeScript, and it is designed around privacy first. The character, Rocky, is based on a five limbed alien engineer from the novel Project Hail Mary, and the software implementation is MIT licensed, though the underlying character and story rights are not. How it works: the app periodically takes a single screenshot and sends it to a vision model, which decides what Rocky should say or do. You choose where that screenshot goes. The default option runs a model locally through Ollama on your own machine at localhost, so nothing is sent anywhere. There is also an optional cloud option using OpenAI, but only if you provide your own API key and explicitly opt in beyond the initial setup. Screenshots are never saved to disk in either case, they exist only in memory for the moment they are analyzed. The app also refuses to describe anything it judges sensitive, such as logins or private messages, and a stricter Classic mode limits Rocky to a small set of fixed categories like coding, meeting, or idle rather than free description. For most people, installation means downloading a ready made file. There is a signed installer for Windows and a disk image for macOS, both available from the project's Releases page. Because the macOS build is not yet officially signed by Apple, the first launch requires running one Terminal command to remove a quarantine flag, and updates may ask for a few one time permission approvals. Running the project from source requires Node.js 22.12 or newer, plus either Ollama installed locally or an OpenAI account if you want the cloud option. A short quick start guide walks through cloning the repository, installing dependencies with npm, optionally setting an API key in a local environment file, and launching the app in development mode with npm run dev.