What you need installed

Nico runs on macOS on Apple silicon.

Recording and transcribing need nothing else. The speech model ships inside the app and runs on this Mac, so dictation works on a fresh install with no network.

The three command-line tools

Asking questions, running tasks and building apps need one of three tools installed on your Mac, under your own subscription. Nico drives whichever of them it finds. It does not resell them, mark them up, or proxy a single request through us — which is why there are no tokens on our meter.

Claude Code

For asks, tasks and apps. What you ask goes to Anthropic.

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

Codex

For asks, tasks and apps. What you ask goes to OpenAI.

curl -fsSL https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.sh | sh

Ollama

Runs models on this Mac. No account, and nothing is sent anywhere.

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

Each of those is the vendor's own documented macOS installer, read off their own page rather than remembered. Nico shows the command and never runs it — it is your Mac. When you ask for something that needs a tool you have not got, Nico says so on the answer and offers the command to copy, rather than refusing.

Which one to pick

If you already pay for Claude Code or Codex, use that one: you are paying for it either way and Nico is the part that makes the output last.

Pick Ollama if you would rather nothing left the machine at all. The trade is patience. Measured on a real Mac, a local model took over three minutes just to produce its first word against a long transcript, so Nico now gives a local model up to fifteen minutes to answer where a hosted one gets far less. It is slower, and it is the only option where the text never goes anywhere.

MCP tools

Nico can grant an agent access to MCP tools, one at a time, and never by default. Nothing is switched on because it exists.