Under the hood
How the overlay stays out of a screen share.
Sokrates shows its answers in a small window on your own screen. When you share your screen or record the call, that window is left out. You see it, and the people on the call don’t. The app doesn’t do this with a trick inside Zoom or Teams. It asks the operating system to leave the window out of every capture.
The mechanism
- macOS: the window is marked with the system’s “not shareable” setting (
NSWindow.sharingType = .none). Screen sharing, screenshots and screen recordings that go through macOS’s own capture leave it out. - Windows: the window is flagged with
SetWindowDisplayAffinity(WDA_EXCLUDEFROMCAPTURE). Windows removes it from the image that screen-share and recording apps receive. - Because the operating system does the exclusion, it works the same in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex and browser-based calls, with no setting to change in them.
- It is on by default, on every plan including Free. You can switch it off in Settings, for example to show the app in a demo.
What it needs
- Windows 10 version 2004 (May 2020 Update) or newer, or Windows 11. Older Windows builds don’t have the exclusion flag, so they show the window as a black box in a share. Sokrates checks the build at launch and warns you before you rely on it.
- macOS on Apple Silicon, the platform Sokrates is built for.
What it cannot hide
The exclusion covers software capture of your screen. It cannot change what is physically visible:
- A camera pointed at your monitor, including your webcam if the screen reflects in your glasses. The phone companion has a true-black screen with a dimmer for this.
- Someone in the room with you.
- Your eyes moving to read. Answers are short on purpose, and the Say paragraph is written to be read aloud in your own voice.
Some employers don’t allow outside help during an interview. Check the rules for yours. Practice mode and Meeting mode are built for preparation and ordinary work calls.
Other ways it stays out of the way
- It stays off the Windows taskbar.
- An opacity control dims it, and Ghost mode passes clicks straight through it to the call app.
- No bot joins the call and nothing is installed in Zoom, Teams or Meet. Sokrates listens to the computer’s own audio.