You know the feeling: the question lands, your mind blanks, and six weeks of prep vanish in ten seconds of silence. The cloud copilots that promise to help route your interview audio, your screen, and your answers through someone else's servers — and a server that holds your interviews is a server that can leak them. I wasn't willing to take that trade, so I built the version that keeps everything on my machine.
How it works
Two minutes to set up. Real-time answers in every interview after.
Install & add your key
Download Sotto and paste in your own Anthropic key — your existing Claude subscription token, or an API key. That's the setup — a couple of minutes, once. On first launch it fetches the open-source Whisper speech model (~1.6 GB) — the only download Sotto ever does. Your data still never leaves your Mac.
It listens & watches — locally
On-device speech-to-text hears the question; local screen awareness sees the problem. That raw audio and screen capture never leaves your Mac.
Answers appear, sotto voce
A quiet overlay feeds you a sharp answer in real time — so you talk through it instead of freezing. The only thing that ever leaves your Mac: the question itself, sent to Claude under your own key.
Your interview stays yours.
- There is no Sotto server. Speech-to-text, screen awareness, and the overlay all run on your Mac. There's no backend — so there's nothing to breach and nothing for me to hand over.
- A hard egress ban. No audio, no screen, no transcripts are ever sent to me. Outbound traffic is exactly two things: api.anthropic.com under your own key, and a one-time fetch of the open-source Whisper model from huggingface.co on first run — a download, nothing uploaded. Watch it with Little Snitch if you don't believe me.
- Bring your own key. I never see your data, your interviews, or your API key. By design, I can't.
Sotto vs. the cloud copilots
They charge you monthly to hold your data. I'd rather you keep both.
| Sotto | Subscription cloud copilots | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $59 once, yours forever | A subscription — often $50+ / month |
| Where it runs | ✓ On your Mac | ✕ Through their cloud |
| Your interview data | ✓ Never leaves your machine | ✕ Flows through their servers |
| AI billing | Your key, billed by Anthropic, no markup | Bundled & marked up in the subscription |
| A server that can be breached? | ✓ None exists | ✕ Yes — it's how they work |
Swipe the table sideways to compare →
Who made this
One person. No fake numbers.
I built Sotto for my own job search first. I wanted live help in interviews without streaming them to a company that could get breached, subpoenaed, or just change its mind about my data — so I made the tool I actually wanted to use.
It launched today. No inflated user counts, no "trusted by" logos — it's brand new. What there is instead: a clean privacy model you can verify yourself, a build signed and notarized by Apple, and a price that reflects the fact that I'm not hosting anything.
I'm shipping this without my name on it — the same instinct that makes you not want your interviews sitting in someone's cloud. What should earn your trust here isn't my face; it's that there's no server to trust in the first place, and an Apple-notarized binary you can inspect yourself.
And because there's no server, Sotto keeps working even if I stop building it tomorrow — it runs entirely on your Mac, so there's nothing for anyone to shut down.
Use it within the rules of whatever interview or meeting you're in — I won't pretend otherwise. If you want to poke holes in the privacy model, please do; I'd genuinely rather hear it. And if you'd rather not put your call in someone else's cloud, Sotto's yours for $59.
— built solo, shipped quietly on purpose
Pricing
One payment. Yours to keep.
No subscription. No server.
Sotto for macOS
Goes to $89 after launch.
- The full on-device copilot: live speech-to-text, screen awareness, real-time answer overlay
- Works for technical and behavioral interviews
- Bring your own Anthropic key — you pay Anthropic cents, you never pay me a markup
- Hard egress ban baked in — audio, screen & transcripts never leave your Mac
- Free updates while I keep building it — delivered by re-download, no auto-updater phoning home — and you email me directly for help
Instant download after checkout — no account with me required.
14-day money-back guarantee. If it doesn't earn its keep, email me and I refund you.
Requires an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer) and your own Anthropic key. Signed & notarized by Apple (Developer ID).
Less than one month of a cloud copilot subscription — and you never pay again.
FAQ
Questions you should ask.
Will the interviewer see it on my screen share?
No — and this is the part I engineered hardest. The overlay uses macOS content protection, the same OS flag that keeps password fields out of screen recordings, so Zoom, Meet, and Teams capture your screen without it. Sotto doesn't just set the flag and hope: on launch — and again whenever your display setup changes — it takes a real screen-capture of itself and refuses to run the overlay unless it's provably absent from that capture. It fails closed. I still won't promise invisibility, because no honest tool can, and you should use it within the rules of any interview or meeting you join.
What's BYOK? Do I need my own key?
BYOK means "bring your own key" — Sotto connects straight to Anthropic (it runs on Claude) with a credential you control, and that's the reason it has no server, no markup, and no access to your data. Already subscribed to Claude? Use that: run Anthropic's own claude setup-token, paste the token into Sotto, done — it rides your existing plan, no new account, no metered billing. No subscription? A pay-as-you-go API key works too.
I don't have a Claude subscription. How hard is the API key?
It's a form, not a skill. Four steps: create a free account at console.anthropic.com, add a card (Anthropic pre-loads a few dollars of credit — that covers months of interviews), click "Create Key," and paste it into Sotto. About three minutes, once. The app shows you each step as you go. If you can sign up for Netflix, you can do this.
What does it actually cost to run?
After the one-time $59: on a Claude subscription token, nothing extra — it rides the plan you already pay for. On an API key, you pay only your own AI usage, billed directly by Anthropic — typically a few cents per interview. Either way there's no Sotto meter, no monthly fee, no markup. In my own use, a month of interviewing has cost less than a single coffee.
Does my interview data ever leave my computer?
No. Speech-to-text and screen awareness run entirely on your Mac, and Sotto has a hard egress ban — the only network call is from your machine straight to Anthropic, under your own key. (First launch also downloads the open-source Whisper speech model from huggingface.co, once — traffic in, never your data out.) There is no Sotto server. I never see your interviews, your data, or your key.
What if it doesn't work for me?
Email me within 14 days and I refund you, no questions asked. It launched today and has no reviews yet, so the risk should sit with me, not you.
Is this a subscription?
No. $59 once, and Sotto is yours — it runs on your machine, on your key, for good. The launch price will go up to $89 later.
What do I need to run it?
An Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer) and an Anthropic API key. That's it — no account with me, no sign-up, no cloud dependency beyond your own key's call to Anthropic. The download is code-signed with my Apple Developer ID.