Companion & Align for Mac
The private-beta Companion that lives in your Mac's notch, picks what needs you from your tools, keeps follow-ups both ways, moves tickets after you push code, and hands you the next step as one tap.
Private beta
Companion and Align for Mac are part of Align's private beta. See Getting beta access below.
What the Companion does
The Companion watches the sources you connect (Gmail, Slack, your calendar and your work tools), picks the requests, decisions and follow-ups that need you, and shows a short list with the reason each item is there and a suggested next step. It lives at Home → Companion and, on a Mac, in the notch.
- You tap, it acts. Align reads your sources. It creates Work or a Decision, saves a file to Pages, moves a Jira or Linear ticket, opens a pull request or sends a suggested Slack reply only after you press the button for it. It never acts by itself.
- Gmail is read-only. For email it sees the sender, subject and Gmail's short preview, not full message bodies. It cannot send, delete or label mail.
- Practice mode first. It starts silent: it shows what it would have told you, you rate the picks, and you turn notifications on when it's accurate. You can go back to practice mode at any time.
- Untrusted text stays untrusted. Text from email and chat can't instruct the Companion to do anything.
- Sensitive mail is quiet. Legal, HR, health and financial topics never trigger a notification. Security and billing alerts, and real asks from people, do come through; marketing does not.
The inbox can group picks by project or source, filter them, and apply bulk actions (dismiss, not relevant, snooze, relevant). A project that turns at-risk sends one signal, and doesn't repeat while it stays at risk. Pages in Notion and files in Figma that you've linked raise a quiet signal when someone else edits them.
Workspace policy
Workspace owners and admins control the Companion from Team settings: a master switch, which sources are allowed, how long data is kept (7 to 730 days), and whether rules, commitment reading and AI extraction are allowed. Every change goes to the workspace audit log. If you belong to several workspaces, the most restrictive combination applies.
Align for Mac
Align for Mac puts the Companion in your notch (a drawn one on Macs without a notch). Hover the notch to open it, press ⌃⌥Space from any app for the quick bar, and get native notifications once you've left practice mode.
Hide or show the notch from the menu-bar icon: right-click it and choose Hide Notch or Show Notch (it's also in the … menu of the panel the icon opens). The menu-bar icon stays either way.
The six tabs
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| For you | The short list. Each item says why it's here and has its next step ready: Create Work, a suggested Slack reply, Decision, Snooze. Mail, Slack, code and meeting items all appear here. |
| Now | What your coding agents are doing, what's in front of you, and what to do when a session finishes (commit and push). |
| Follow-ups | Two lists. Waiting on: what someone owes you, with their avatar. You owe: what's due from you (mail and Slack, Work, decisions nobody settled). Mark done or snooze in one tap. Anything more than a week late is counted as a backlog to clear in Align instead of listed. |
| Messages | Who wrote to you, with their avatar: Slack asks and unread Align Chat conversations together. |
| Calendar | A week strip and the day's meetings, a Join button when a meeting is close, and your follow-ups with the people you're about to meet. |
| Desk | Music, Shelf, Clipboard and your day, one tap apart. |
Every tab has an empty state that says what belongs there and how to fill it.
One tap into Align
Items in the notch connect to the rest of Align. Each is a single tap, and nothing happens until you press it:
- Create Work from a mail or Slack request.
- Decision records any mail, Slack or meeting item as a Decision, with the item as its context and a link back.
- Add to Work when you commit and push from the notch: if the branch names a ticket that exists in your Work (such as
ALI-12), the commit becomes a comment on it; otherwise you can log it as new Work. Jira and Linear tickets still move through the Move to In Progress / In Review cards. - Create all after a meeting ends, to create the decisions and action items Align drafted from it.
- Save to Pages on a file in the shelf uploads it as a private Pages document and opens it.
- Share on a file gives a link that anyone with the link can open: the image, PDF, video or audio itself, with a Download button. Turn the link off from the document in Pages.
A Your day card appears each morning after 8:00 local time, built from what you owe, today's meetings and decisions waiting on you. It never calls a language model; every line is a fact from your own data.
On weekdays after 8:00 you also get Your standup is ready: the same standup as Plans → Standup, written from your commits, pull requests, coding-agent sessions and tickets, with Copy standup to paste it into Slack.
After you push: move the ticket
When a session's work is committed, either from Commit & push in the notch or by the coding agent itself running git commit (Claude Code and Codex), Align looks for the ticket it belongs to, in Jira, Linear or Align Plans:
- A ticket key in the branch name (such as
ALI-12orENG-431) wins. - Otherwise it compares the commit message and the changed file names with the open tickets assigned to you, and Align's decision model checks the best match. Only the commit message, file paths and ticket text are used. Your prompts stay on your Mac.
The card offers the next step in that ticket's own workflow, for example Move ENG-7 to In Review?. It reads Jira's transitions, Linear's ordered states or your Plans project's workflow, so it never jumps straight to Done. Not this ticket teaches it: that ticket isn't offered again for the repo.
Follow-ups: waiting on someone
A follow-up is either something you owe or something you're waiting on. Waiting-on items come from:
- Work you gave someone: a Plans task you created and assigned to someone else. It closes itself when the task is done.
- Your asks in Slack and mail: "can you send me…", "please share…", "waiting on…". This needs Spot follow-ups in what I write, which is off by default.
- The notch: Waiting on (their name) in any item's … menu.
When that person shares a file in Align Chat, in Slack, or by sharing a Pages document with you, the notch asks Did Rahul send what you were waiting for?. Press Mark received to close it. It never closes anything by itself.
Coding agents
Connect Claude Code, Codex or Antigravity from the Companion window or the menu-bar menu. Align adds a small hook to the agent's settings (and removes it when you disconnect). You then see what each session is doing, can Allow or Deny a request from the notch, see your Claude plan usage and limit, and get a Done · N files to commit card with Commit & push when a session finishes. Only the files that session changed are committed.
Your prompts and commands stay on your Mac. Only app names and project-relative file paths are sent to Align, and only for features you turned on.
Desk
- Music from any app (Music, Spotify, YouTube Music in a browser, and anything else macOS reports as playing), with the cover, a seekable progress bar and controls. Lyrics are opt-in: turning them on looks the song up on lrclib.net with its title, artist, album and length, and nothing else.
- Shelf is a drop zone. Files wait there until you drag them out, Save to Pages, Share a link or send them to a chat. The shelf keeps references, not copies.
- Clipboard keeps what you copied, in memory only. Anything a password manager marks private is skipped.
- Day is an opt-in breakdown of which apps you used. It records app names only, never contents.
Volume and battery changes also show briefly in the notch. This is display only; macOS's own volume overlay and your keys are unchanged.
Choose what it can see
In the Companion window, On your notch has a switch for each optional feature. All of them are off until you turn them on:
- the notch itself,
- Track my day,
- Claude Code, Codex and Antigravity,
- Spot follow-ups in what I write: lets Align read the short preview of mail you sent and the Slack messages you wrote, to notice your asks and promises,
- Synced lyrics.
Set up
Get beta access
Request access from Join the beta in any app's sidebar (see below). When you're in, a Download for Mac button appears on the Companion page.
Install and sign in
Open the app and choose Continue in browser. You approve the Mac once in Align, with nothing to copy or paste. During the beta the app isn't notarized yet: the first time, right-click the app, choose Open, then click Open.
Connect your tools
Connect Gmail, Slack and the rest from Align. The Companion starts watching in practice mode.
Turn it on when you trust it
Rate a few picks, then switch on notifications. Sign out from the app, or disconnect the Mac from the Companion page, whenever you like.
Requirements: macOS 13 Ventura or later, on Apple silicon or Intel, and at least one connected source.
The Mac app uses its own token that can only read and act on your Companion. It's stored hashed on the server and can be revoked at any time; signing out revokes it.
Troubleshooting
- The notch doesn't appear. Check Show Notch in the menu-bar menu, or the Align in the notch switch in the Companion window.
- A tab is empty. That's the empty state telling you what to connect: a calendar for Calendar, Slack or Align Chat for Messages, and so on.
- A Gmail link opens an error page. Update the app: links now open the thread for the right signed-in account.
- A shared link says "not found" for the person you sent it to. Share the file again from an updated app: older versions made a private page link instead of a share link.
- Nothing happens when you press an action. Each action runs only for the connection you approved; if a Jira, Linear or GitHub connection has expired, reconnect it from Align.
Getting beta access
One request covers every private-beta feature: Autopilot, Pulse, Memory, Briefing, the Knowledge graph, and Companion with the Mac app.
- Sign in and click Join the beta in the sidebar of any Align app, or go to
home.meet-align.com/beta. - Click Request beta access. The page shows that you're on the list.
- We let people in a few at a time. When you're in, you get an email and the beta features appear in your sidebar the next time a page loads.
Access is per person, not per workspace.
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