Move
Hold your hand open, fingers up, and move it. The cursor rides your palm.
Touch-free gesture & voice control for macOS
A mouse made of thin air.
A Mac that answers to its name.
Pawvis reads your hand through the webcam. Raise it in the air and the cursor follows, dip a finger to click, or say “Pawvis, open Safari” out loud. No mouse under your palm, no trackpad, nothing to touch. Your camera never sends a frame anywhere.
Gestures
Your webcam is the sensor.
The camera already built into your Mac watches your hand and tracks its 21 joints many times a second, using Apple's Vision framework. Nothing to wear, nothing to hold, no depth sensor, no hardware to buy. Sit down, hold up a hand, and your Mac can already see it.
Tracking watches whenever it's on, but the cursor only follows once you show an open hand: all four fingers up, thumb free. Close a fist for a moment, or leave the frame, and it parks. A hand that's merely visible, resting or typing or gesturing, never drags the cursor around.
Click
Dip your index finger, like tapping a mouse button. A quick release is always a clean click.
measured against your middle finger, so tilting your hand can't click
Right-click
Dip a second finger. Hold it down to right-drag.
pinky by default, configurable
Drag & hold
Keep the finger down and move. Deliberate movement starts a drag immediately; a short window protects quick clicks from becoming accidental drags.
the window length is a slider
Double & triple click
Tap again quickly in the same spot. Chained clicks land where the first one did.
Scroll
Fold your middle and ring fingers in, index and pinky up, then move your hand up and down. The cursor parks while the pose is held.
toggle it, or invert the direction, in Settings
Reach adapts to distance
Auto mode sizes the tracking area from how big your hand looks, so the whole screen stays reachable up close and far away, with your fingers still inside the camera frame. Manual mode gives you a fixed area and a slider.
“Show an open hand. The cursor is yours.”
On screen, a claw rides your palm: open while pointing, purple while the left button is held, blue for the right, ringed in light blue while scrolling, faded while control is parked. A ring tightens as your click forms, a pulse confirms every click, and small dots mark each detected fingertip. The menu bar icon opens a live status panel (hands seen, control armed, voice state) plus a Gesture Guide that walks through every move. Everything above is tunable in Settings → Gestures.
In motion
Eight seconds, no hardware.
One hand, one built-in camera, and a cursor that goes where she points.
Voice beta
Talk to your Mac
by name
Switch it on in Settings → Voice (Beta), press Start in the menu bar, and say the wake word. Every command begins with it, so anything you say that isn't meant for Pawvis is ignored: never acted on, never typed, never put on screen.
- Pawvis, go to github.com
- Pawvis, type good morning
- Pawvis, press command shift T
- Pawvis, open Notes
- Pawvis, switch to Chrome
- Pawvis, scroll down a page
- Pawvis, click sign in
- Pawvis, stop listening
The wake word is configurable, and mishearings are tolerated. Speech recognition is Apple's on-device engine: private, free, no API key, no cloud. Anything that isn't a set phrase goes to on-device Apple Intelligence, which maps your words to an intent and grounds screen commands like “click sign in” against the area around your pointer, widening to the whole screen only if the target isn't nearby. That part needs macOS 26; everything else works without it.
optional · off by default
Or hand the whole command to an agent
Point Pawvis at an agent CLI you already have installed, Claude Code or Codex, and it stops parsing your speech and starts delegating it. Say “Pawvis, clean up my downloads folder” and everything after the wake word is piped to the agent to carry out with computer use, running headless in the background.
- A panel streams the agent's output live while it works, with a Cancel button.
- Running sessions stay listed, and cancellable, under Settings → Voice.
- The outcome, success or failure, always flashes in the on-screen capsule.
- “Pawvis, stop listening” stays local, so you can always shut it off instantly.
Read this part twice: the agent does not ask. Claude Code and Codex are launched with their own permission prompts turned off, so nothing pauses to confirm anything. Whatever the agent was handed, it carries out, with your account, your files and your logged-in sessions: deleting things, installing things, running shell commands, sending things on your behalf. Speech recognition is not perfect, and a misheard command is still executed. This is also the one mode that sends what you say beyond your Mac. It ships off by default, and Pawvis makes you accept a warning dialog before it will turn on. If you want a confirmation step before actions run, stay on the on-device handler. Turning it on is your call and your responsibility: no liability is accepted for what an agent does with your machine, however it was asked.
Lean back. Say the word.
Privacy
Nothing leaves your Mac
unless you ask it to.
on-device
Hand tracking
Apple's Vision framework, running entirely on your machine. Camera frames are processed in memory and discarded.
on-device
Speech recognition
Apple's on-device engine: SpeechAnalyzer on macOS 26+, SFSpeechRecognizer before that. Voice audio never leaves your Mac.
on-device
Visual commands
On-device Apple Intelligence reads the screen around your pointer. Its snapshots stay in memory, never written to disk, never uploaded.
- The menu bar icon carries a dot for as long as the mic is live, and an on-screen pill announces listening, then fades so it isn't sitting on your screen all day.
- The claw overlay is excluded from screenshots and screen recordings by default. (There's a toggle if you want to record a demo.)
- No API key, no account, no cloud service in the setup you get out of the box. The optional agent hand-off is the one exception, and it stays off until you switch it on.
Install
Thirty seconds to paws-on
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Download
Pawvis.zip, always the latest release.
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Unzip
Releases are signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens normally, with no right-click → Open.
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Drag to Applications
Pawvis lives in your menu bar and starts with you at login. (There's a toggle, and it won't put itself back.)
On first run, it asks for
- CameraHand tracking. Frames are processed in memory and discarded.
- AccessibilityMoving the cursor and clicking. Tracking runs without it, but clicks won't land until it's granted.
- MicrophoneOnly when you first start voice control.
- Screen Recording (optional)Lets visual voice commands OCR what accessibility can't describe. Everything else works without it.
- Notifications (optional)Asked the first time an update is actually waiting, never at launch. Say no and new versions still show in the menu bar.