A window above the call that the call cannot see
The overlay is the reason everything else on this site is possible. It is a desktop window that floats over whatever you are doing and is excluded from screen capture by the operating system — so it stays out of shares, recordings and screenshots.
macOS and Windows · Windows 10 build 2004 or newer
- The call, full size
- The overlay above it
- The running transcript
- The answer, streaming in
- The call, full size
- Nothing else
- Nothing else
- Nothing else
Mechanism
How a window excludes itself from capture
This is not a trick and not a race against screen recorders. Both desktop operating systems provide a documented way for an application to mark a window as excluded from capture, and the compositor then leaves it out of every frame it hands to any capturing application — the conferencing app included.
Because the exclusion happens in the compositor rather than in Whisperer, it works the same for a screen share, a local recording and a screenshot, without Whisperer knowing which is which.
- Covered Screen sharing The window is absent from the stream the other participants receive, whichever service is carrying it.
- Covered Recordings and screenshots Anything capturing the screen through the system gets the same frames the share does, so the window is missing there too.
- Not covered A camera pointed at your monitor A phone, a webcam over your shoulder, a person next to you. Nothing in software reaches outside the machine.
Why it matters
The overlay is what removes the bot
Once assistance lives in a window on your own machine, it no longer needs to be a participant in the meeting. No invite, no admin approval, no name in the list, and no integration with a specific conferencing service — which is why the same setup works on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Telegram, Discord and whatever your client uses instead.
Limits
Where the exclusion stops
-
First
Software capture only
The guarantee covers what the operating system composites. It says nothing about a camera, a second person in the room, or monitoring software that watches the process list rather than the screen — proctoring tools typically do exactly that.
-
Second
It still needs to hear the call
The window is only half of it. The other half is system audio: on macOS the Screen Recording permission, on Windows the default output device. Without it the overlay shows your side of the conversation and nothing else.
Questions
What people ask first
Is the overlay really invisible when I share my screen?
A window excluded from capture does not appear in the shared stream, in recordings or in screenshots. On Windows this requires version 10 build 2004 or newer; on older builds the exclusion is not available.
Can I move and resize it?
Yes — it is an ordinary desktop window in every respect except being excluded from capture, and it can be positioned wherever it does not sit on top of what you are reading.
Does it work if I share a single window instead of the screen?
Yes, and in that case it is doubly absent: you are sharing one application, and the overlay is a different one which is also excluded from capture.
Will monitoring software detect it?
It may. Proctoring and endpoint tools usually inspect running processes rather than the picture on screen, and no window-level exclusion hides a process. Where the rules of an assessment have been stated, they apply.
Do I need it at all if I am not sharing?
The exclusion matters when you share. The window itself matters always: it is what keeps the assistant next to the call instead of in another application you have to switch to.
Check it in thirty seconds
Start a call with yourself on a second device, share your screen, and look at the second device. Whatever you can see in the overlay will not be there.
Related pages