When we first released our AI assistant, Eney, in May of this year, we knew it had the potential to transform how users interact with their Macs. The initial release was limited, yet garnered interest from thousands of individuals around the world who believed in our vision of making machines work better for people.
The first version of Eney featured a fully cloud-based engine, providing a solid starting point for its deployment. But we saw the potential for new technical innovations that could streamline task execution, broaden integrations, and provide users with a more personalized experience beyond what the cloud can offer.
Over the past few months, we’ve been collecting feedback from our community to understand how users actually interact with Eney, what features they liked and disliked, and what skills they hoped to see in future releases. We iterated tirelessly with the goal of creating an assistant that helps users work faster and smarter while keeping their data secure.
Now, we’re excited to announce a meaningful milestone that takes us closer to accomplishing both. Today, we’re launching a new Eney: one that lives more on your Mac than in the cloud.
Why We’re Investing in Local
Since day one, MacPaw has been committed to delivering the best, most innovative software solutions while keeping user privacy and security at the core of all our products. While there are ways to do this via the cloud, local engines keep your data closer to you, making it one of the reasons we’re implementing this change within Eney.
Eney’s new ELIX engine (Eney Local Intelligence MLX) automatically defaults to local processing and storage, meaning that reasoning, context search, skill execution, and conversation history are kept on the device rather than being sent to the cloud.
In the few situations that require Eney to interact with the cloud – such as utilizing API skills that require external services or downloading new skill manifests – we’ve limited data egress (the process of data leaving the network) to only essential information. Before this happens, any personal, identifiable information is filtered out, ensuring user data is anonymized.
On top of that, a local engine enables Eney to accomplish tasks and answer user queries instantly, eliminating downtime and loading times to help keep users situated within their workflow. On-device inference eliminates the need for user queries to access the network, allowing Eney to provide solutions much faster than before. There’s no need for Eney to pause and “think” to figure out what skill you may need for your solution; it offers the optimal tool as soon as you hit “enter.” If there isn’t a tool that Eney can provide or there’s something it doesn’t understand, it’ll offer a response rather than continuously loading or going silent.
A More Personalized Eney: Built for You and Your Mac
The aim of the new local engine is not only to provide faster support for queries, but also to enable improved contextual memory for better, more accurate solutions. In the upcoming release, Eney will be able to better remember previous interactions, removing redundancies such as the need to repeat instructions within the same conversation. While this is a meaningful start and will streamline interactions with Eney, we’re working to expand this functionality in future updates.
More personalized conversations are just one part of this update. We understand that workflows often involve many platforms, and it can be cumbersome to switch between them. To help users access the everyday tools they love seamlessly from one place, we’ve also expanded third-party integrations within Eney.
Eney now features support for platforms such as Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, enabling users to swiftly complete more tasks without needing to open new windows or flip between apps. More integrations are coming soon, taking us one step closer to making Eney a truly single, universal interface.
In addition, when deep in a workflow, your desktop can quickly become filled with multiple webpages, program windows, folders, and more. This is why we’ve revamped Eney’s on-screen placement to be more compact and unobtrusive. Now, Eney sits quietly in the lower left or right-hand corner of your screen, accessible when you need it without adding to on-screen clutter.
What’s Next for Eney?
We’re proud of the updates we’ve deployed thus far, but we know there’s more to be done. Since the beginning, MacPaw has understood the value in actively communicating and collaborating with users and developers alike. Eney takes this commitment a step further. We’re excited to continue exploring how to collaborate with users and developers to provide deeper integrations within Eney.
This new version of Eney is available exclusively on Setapp, and we encourage you to try it out and provide your feedback. A wider open beta release of Eney is also coming to macOS soon in 2026, and user feedback is invaluable for shaping the future of Eney.
Install Eney on Setapp here: https://setapp.com/apps/eney
