Raycast Launches Screen Awareness, Feeding Active Window Context Directly to Its AI Chat

Raycast has shipped a new feature called Screen Awareness in version 0.71, letting its built-in AI pull context from whatever app or window a user has focused without requiring manual copy-paste, screenshot uploads, or typed explanations.

What Screen Awareness does

According to Raycast, Screen Awareness "brings context from your focused app or window into AI Chat or Quick AI, so you don't have to copy text, attach screenshots, or explain what you're looking at." Users can trigger it three ways: the Send Focused Window to AI command, selecting Screen Awareness from the @ menu inside AI Chat, or simply typing prompts like "summarise this" or "reply to this."

When activated, the context sent to Raycast AI can include:

• App and window details
• Selected text
• The focused UI control
• A screenshot of the focused window

On macOS, triggering the feature from Finder also pulls in information about selected files or folders. Raycast's separate Browser Companion extension extends this further, letting the AI access webpage details and content beyond what's currently visible in the viewport.

Raycast says users can bind a dedicated hotkey to the feature through a short onboarding flow that appears the first time the command is used. The company notes its own team prefers double-tapping the right Command key as a trigger. Related commands—Send Selected Text to AI, Send Screen Area to AI, and Send Screen to AI—can each get their own keyboard shortcuts.

Other changes in v0.71

The release bundles several smaller updates alongside Screen Awareness:

• A new Ask Screen Awareness AI Extension for quickly injecting context into queries
• Compaction and context management support for AI conversations
• Quick AI now respects the existing "Send Message" setting, allowing Command+Return submission
• Dictation gains vocabulary and hotkey import from other apps, plus a new "Add Word to Vocabulary" command
• A new Ask Feedback AI Extension for contacting the Raycast team directly
• Support for keyboard chords using modifiers held on both sides of the keyboard (e.g., left ⌘ + right ⌘), including recording and display in the hotkey recorder

Raycast has not disclosed pricing changes tied to this update, and the company has not published specific latency or accuracy figures for how Screen Awareness performs compared to manual context-sharing.

What this means

Screen Awareness targets a specific friction point in AI-assisted workflows: the repetitive act of copying text or taking screenshots just to give a chatbot context. By capturing window state, selected text, and screenshots automatically, Raycast is positioning its AI layer as an ambient assistant rather than a chat window that requires manual feeding.

This follows a broader pattern among AI-native productivity tools—Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT desktop apps have both experimented with screen-reading capabilities—suggesting screen context ingestion is becoming a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator. Raycast's advantage is distribution: it's already a system-level launcher on macOS, giving it lower-friction access to window and app state than a standalone chat app would have. The feature's usefulness will depend heavily on execution details Raycast hasn't fully specified, including how screenshots and text are processed, what's sent to underlying model providers, and what privacy controls exist for sensitive on-screen content.