Memoe vs Dottie
Jude Mercer, SEO and Content, Memoe — 28 October 2026
Memoe is an agent you talk to, and it talks back. It lives in your Mac's notch instead of in a chat window, so you can talk to it from whatever app you're in. It runs on the AI you already pay for — your Claude subscription through Claude Code, or your ChatGPT plan — so there's no new model to buy. Underneath, it runs Hermes Agent, the open-source agent harness from Nous Research, and it keeps a memory of you in plain files on your Mac that you can read, edit and delete.
Hold one key from any app, say what you need, and Moe answers out loud and goes and does it. It connects to around 1,400 services, and it has its own browser, signed in as you. You can message Moe over Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, email, Signal and LINE. Before Moe sends anything to another person it shows you exactly what will go out and waits for your click. About 2 to 5 seconds before it speaks.
What Dottie is
Dottie describes itself on its own homepage as “Control Your Mac. With your voice,” and lists four things it says most assistants can't do: “Voice Dictation” — “Hold Option+Space, speak, release. Your words type in at the cursor, in any app, instantly, with no separate window”; a “‘Hey Dottie’ Wake Word” to “call her hands-free” and “ask a question, dictate a message, or kick off a task without touching the keyboard”; “It Gets Things Done” — “Email, calendar, messages, music, web search, app control, and screen vision, chained together to finish real work”; and “Your Model, Your Way” — “Run local models on your Mac, bring your own API keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Cerebras), or subscribe to Dottie Pro for keyless Grok.” Its own feature copy also states: “Sends the email, books the meeting, searches the web — does the task, not just chat about it” and “Screen vision lets Dottie read what you're looking at and act on it.” Its privacy policy states that with a local model “all data processing happens entirely on your device” and Dottie “works fully offline in this mode,” while choosing a cloud provider means “your prompts and context are sent to those providers for processing,” and that Dottie itself collects “nothing by default” — its policy says nothing is sent without consent to track usage, run analytics or report crashes — with API keys and conversation history “stored locally on your device” and “never transmitted to us.” Its own footer states it runs on “Apple Silicon · macOS 15.4+,” and its download prompt says “It's only for Mac right now.” Everything in this paragraph and in the right-hand column below comes from dottie.ai and dottie.ai/privacy — their own home page copy and privacy policy — read 28 October 2026. Its pricing page (dottie.ai/pricing) loaded the same home page on that date and named no dollar figure for Dottie Pro anywhere on it.
Side by side
Memoe's column is the live, Approved wording from docs.memoe.app today.
| Memoe | Dottie | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An agent you talk to from any app, that answers out loud and does the work. | “Control Your Mac. With your voice,” by its own homepage headline. |
| Starting a turn | Hold one key from any app and say what you need. | Two entry points by its own feature list: hold Option+Space and speak for dictation into the app under the cursor, or say “Hey Dottie” to call it hands-free for a question or a task. |
| What comes back | A spoken answer, and the task carried out — mail and calendar read, a meeting noted, a Mac app driven for you. | “Sends the email, books the meeting, searches the web” by its own feature copy, plus screen vision that it says lets it “read what you're looking at and act on it.” |
| Where your speech is processed | “Speech recognition runs on your Mac using local models, and audio is not stored after it is transcribed. On the free tier your voice does not leave your Mac.” | “All data processing happens entirely on your device” with a local model, by its own privacy policy; choosing a cloud provider instead sends “prompts and context” to that provider, and Dottie itself says it collects “nothing by default” and stores API keys and conversation history “locally on your device,” “never transmitted to us.” |
| The thinking | Your own Claude or ChatGPT plan, an API key, or a model on your Mac, driving Hermes Agent. Not resold, not marked up. | “Run local models on your Mac, bring your own API keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Cerebras), or subscribe to Dottie Pro for keyless Grok,” by its own homepage. |
| What it runs on | An Apple silicon Mac, macOS 15 or later. | “Apple Silicon · macOS 15.4+,” by its own footer; its download prompt says “It's only for Mac right now.” |
| Price | Free on the Mac. Away, from $20 a month, is a cloud computer of your own that keeps going when the Mac is shut; Away+ is $50 a month. | “Free Forever” by its own homepage badge, covering the local-model and bring-your-own-key paths. A “Dottie Pro” plan is named for keyless access to Grok, with no dollar figure published on its homepage or its pricing page as of the date read above. |
Trying Memoe
Memoe is a free Mac app, and everything that runs on your Mac is free. It needs an Apple silicon Mac on macOS 15 or later. It is signed and notarized by Apple and it updates itself. It is beta, built by one person, so expect a few rough edges.
See also: Memoe vs VoiceOS and Memoe vs MacWhisper.