AI editing
OpenScreen ships an optional agent that edits your project from a chat panel. It is off until you connect a provider yourself. Apart from the one-time Whisper model download, the provider you connect is the only network OpenScreen uses — for this agent, and for caption translation.
None of this is required. Recording, editing, transcription, captions, and export all work with no account and no provider, whether or not you ever open the chat panel — the only network any of them touches is the one-time Whisper model download on your first transcription.
Connecting a provider
Open the chat column (the toggle at the far left of the top bar, in Edit mode), then AI settings → pick a provider and paste an API key:
| Provider | Notes |
|---|---|
| Claude API (Anthropic) | |
| OpenAI API | |
| Gemini API (Google) | |
| Mistral API | |
| OpenRouter API | One key, many models. |
| MiniMax API / MiniMax Token Plan | |
| OpenAI Compatible | Any OpenAI-shaped endpoint — you supply the base URL. |
Your key is stored encrypted through your OS's credential protection (Electron safeStorage); if encryption isn't available, the write fails rather than falling back to plaintext. OpenScreen's servers never see it, because there aren't any — requests go straight from your machine to the provider you picked. Provider-specific environment variables work too, if you'd rather not store a key at all.
The ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot sign-in options were removed in 1.8.0. They worked by shipping first-party client credentials belonging to those vendors, which isn't ours to redistribute. Use an API-key provider instead.
Using the agent
Describe the edit in plain language — "cut the dead air in the intro", "zoom in when I open the terminal". The agent works through real, undoable timeline operations, not a re-render: it can add and adjust trims, zooms, speed regions, annotations and Full Camera segments, edit clip in/out points, reorder or remove clips, and read the transcript to find what you're referring to.
The panel around it:
- Conversations — history, rename, delete, and start a new one. Each keeps its own agent state.
- Model picker — live model list from the connected provider, with a reasoning-effort control where the provider supports one.
- Context meter — estimated tokens used against the budget, with a Compact action that summarizes earlier turns instead of dropping them.
- Rewind to this message — rolls back the agent's edits and every follow-up turn after that point, restoring project, conversation, and agent state together.
- + skip — hand the agent an explicit
startSec-endSecrange to cut, when it's easier to say than to describe.
Ctrl/Cmd + Z undoes an agent edit exactly like a manual one.
The Smart zooms + cuts entry in the timeline's auto-enhance menu is the same agent on a one-shot prompt. (The other entry, Automatic zooms, reads recorded cursor movement and needs no provider at all.)
What else uses your provider
Caption translation is a single text-transform call against the same model — it doesn't run the agent loop and can't touch your document. Transcription and caption rendering stay entirely on-device either way.