How Lyra works

When suggestions appear

Lyra offers a suggestion when you pause for about half a second, or when you finish a sentence with . ! or ?. It waits until you've typed at least a few words, so a one-word reply won't set it off.

Mechanical fixes come first, from an open-source grammar engine that is fast and doesn't guess: spelling, apostrophes, its/it's, missing capitals. Then the writing model tidies the sentence, keeping your meaning and your tone. Lyra won't turn a casual message into a formal one.

The Refine marker

When a suggestion is ready, a small marker reading Refine with a Tab key appears beside your cursor, in the space after your text. It doesn't cover your writing. If you're editing in the middle of a sentence, it shrinks to just the Lyra mark.

Ignoring it costs nothing: keep typing and it disappears.

Read it, then accept it

1. Press Tab once to open the suggestion and read it.
2. Press Tab again to replace your text with it.

The two steps are deliberate: Lyra never replaces words you haven't seen. You can also hold ⌥ Option to peek at a suggestion and let go to hide it, or tap ⌥ Option to open and close it. Clicking the marker does the same as Tab.

If your sentence needs no changes, Lyra says “Looks good, nothing to change” instead of offering it back to you.

Getting rid of a suggestion

Any of these clears it:

• Keep typing.
• Press Esc. Lyra keeps the Esc for itself, so it won't close your email draft or chat box.
• Click anywhere. The click goes through to your app as normal.
• Press Return to send your message.
• Switch to another app.

Left alone, it fades by itself after a few seconds.

Rewrite for clarity

For longer messages (a few sentences or more), Lyra offers Rewrite for clarity once per message: a restructured version that's easier to read, rather than line-by-line fixes. Press Tab to open it when no Refine marker is showing.

• On Macs with 12 GB of memory or more, it runs on your Mac, for English.
• With Lyra Cloud, it uses a larger cloud model on any Mac, in any language.

Change the tone with ⌘⌘

Select some text and double-tap ⌘ Command (double-tapping ⌃ Control works too). The Rewrite as panel opens with two versions:

• 1 Professional
• 2 Friendly
• 3 English appears only when the text you selected isn't in English. It translates into English and keeps your tone, so casual stays casual.

Switch with the number keys or the arrow keys, press Return to replace your text, or Esc to close. If nothing is selected, Lyra uses the whole text box. In Gmail and Outlook, select the text first.

Tones run on your Mac. With Lyra Cloud they use the cloud model.

The ✧ button on a selection

When you select text in an app you can type in, a small ✧ appears next to it. Click it to open the same tone panel as ⌘⌘. It doesn't appear in web browsers; use ⌘⌘ there.

Where this all happens

Everything above runs on your Mac with a private on-device model, and works offline. Your writing only leaves your Mac if you subscribe to Lyra Cloud and switch it on. Here's exactly what runs where.