Real-time Detection
See struggle indicators as class happens.
Now accepting pilot teachers
See what your students aren't saying.
The student who goes quiet is the one you lose. Anchor surfaces them while the lesson is still running — reading participation and coursework on your own Mac. No video, and nothing leaves your computer.
Runs on-device on macOS 14+ · No student install · Free for pilot classrooms
Algebra II · Live
24 students
Ava R.
Noah P.
Mia T.
Liam K.
Zoe C.
Ethan W.
Mia T. needs support
Silent 14 min · 2 missed assignments
38
risk
The problem
The challenge of online teaching
In a Zoom class, disengagement is invisible. A student can sit camera-off and silent for weeks, and the first hard signal is a grade — long after the moment you could have helped.
The solution
Who needs you, while you can still act
Anchor reads participation and coursework together, names the student worth checking on, and gives you the question to ask them.
Speaking Time
Who's engaging?
Camera Status
Who's present?
Assignment Data
Who's falling behind?
Every score, explained
No black box
Open a student and Anchor shows the signals behind the number — each one named, weighted and in plain language. A teacher can disagree with it, which they can only do if they can see it.
Your dashboard
Every class you've taught, in one place
Anchor keeps what happened after the meeting ends: which classes you ran, who was behind on work, and every session you can open back up. It is there when the class isn't — and it clears itself after a term unless you say otherwise.
In your menu bar
One click, never another tab
Anchor sits in the menu bar while you teach. A click shows the class you're running, who needs attention right now, and what the lesson is on — without pulling you out of Zoom.
Teacher impact
What the pilot will measure
Anchor has not run a pilot yet, so there are no results to show and nothing here is invented. These are the three things the first group is being run to find out — and when there are numbers and teachers willing to be quoted, they will appear here, measured, attributed and dated.
- Lead time
- How far ahead of a falling grade Anchor flagged the student.
- Precision
- How often a flag was a student who genuinely needed help.
- Retention
- Whether teachers kept using it once the pilot ended.
How it works
3 simple steps
- 01
Connect your Zoom account
One-time authorization. No plugins for students.
- 02
Go live with a class
Anchor listens to session signals as you teach.
- 03
Anchor detects struggling students
Ranked alerts with suggested next steps.
Features
Built for teachers
Classroom Integration
Combine Zoom signals with assignment data.
AI Recommendations
Actionable next steps powered by on-device AI.
Term-long History
See whether today is a bad day or a pattern.
Privacy & security
Privacy first
Anchor is a teacher's instrument, not a surveillance product. There is no data to sell, because none of it ever leaves your Mac.
No facial recognition
Camera on or off is a true/false flag from Zoom. The picture is never read.
On-device processing
Scoring runs on your Mac. Nothing about a student reaches us.
Visible in the call
Anchor appears in the participant list as "Anchor (engagement assistant)".
Captions are never stored
The transcript stays in memory and is discarded when the meeting ends.
FERPA, COPPA and your district
Because student information is never transmitted to us, we never become a holder of education records under FERPA, and the collection that triggers operator obligations under COPPA does not happen. Anchor is a tool operated by a school official — you — under your school's control. That does not remove your school's own duty to notify parents and obtain whatever consent its policy or your state law requires, and the assessment remains your district's to make.
This describes how the software behaves; it is not legal advice. Read the full Privacy Policy.
The pilot
Currently accepting pilots
A small first group of teachers who teach live on Zoom. Free, and honest about being early.
What you're signing up for
- How long
- 6 weeks
- Spots
- 10 teachers in the first group
- What you do
- Teach two live classes a week, then one 30-minute call at the end
- When it starts
- A new group starts as soon as the last one fills up
- What it costs
- Nothing. You're never charged automatically, or without being asked first
The full version — what's asked of you, what's promised back, and how either of us can walk away — is in the Pilot Program Terms.
What you need
A Mac running macOS 14 or later
Anchor runs on your computer, not ours.
A Zoom account you're allowed to connect
You approve it once. Your students don't install anything.
Permission to use it in your classroom
Whatever your school or district requires you to get.
Optional: Google Classroom and Apple Intelligence
Google Classroom adds grades and assignments to what Anchor sees. Apple Intelligence runs the lesson assistant.
Free
for pilot teachers, during the programme
- Free for the whole programme
- Full feature set, nothing held back
- Direct support from the person who built it
- A real say in what Anchor becomes
Apply for the pilot
Takes a minute. You'll hear back from a person.
FAQ
Questions teachers ask
The ones that come up before anyone lets software watch their classroom.
Who's behind Anchor
I built this for the student I was
In a math class, I was completely lost. Everyone around me looked like they were following it, so I never put my hand up — and the longer I left it, the worse asking got, because by then I would have had to admit I hadn't understood anything since the first week. So I never asked. I failed that class.
None of that was visible from the front of the room. A student who is lost and a student who is fine look identical if neither of them says anything. Online, where the camera can be off and the class is a grid of tiles, it is worse.
I started Anchor over the summer as a hackathon project, and kept building it afterwards because the thing that would have helped me was somebody noticing before the grade did.
It's just me — Rishab Reddy Paili. No company, no funding, no investor waiting to be repaid out of a classroom. That's the constraint and the promise: support email is answered by the person who wrote the code, there's no server holding your students' data, and when something is unproven — the model's accuracy, most of all — you'll be told so plainly rather than sold around it.
You can reach me directly at rishabreddy0809@gmail.com.
Ready to support your students?
Apply for the pilot. It takes a minute, and you'll hear back from a person.
Apply for the pilotQuestions? Email rishabreddy0809@gmail.com
On the show
This was on The Professor Kev Show
Prof. Kevin Willett had me on to talk about how a hard summer math class led to a privacy-first macOS app: one that monitors Zoom classes, detects when students are struggling in real time, and alerts the teacher — all without transmitting student voice data to the cloud.
Watch the full conversation6:15