Cluely AI Review
A real-time desktop overlay that listens to your screen and audio during a live call and surfaces suggested answers, marketed on an "undetectable" premise that raises serious integrity concerns for interview and exam use specifically
Pros
- +Technically sophisticated overlay rendering that genuinely does defeat standard screen-share and recording detection in Zoom, Meet, and Teams in ways simpler competitors don't attempt, confirmed by multiple independent technical reviews
- +For legitimate, disclosed use cases, sales calls where your own company already knows you're using AI assistance, or personal meeting prep, real-time contextual suggestions and post-call notes are a genuine, if narrow, category of usefulness
- +Well-capitalized and actively developed, with continued feature expansion (iOS app, CRM integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho, Desktop Widget) suggesting the company isn't going away
- +Custom file upload lets you ground live answers in your own material (a resume, a sales playbook, product documentation) rather than generic model knowledge alone
- +Multilingual transcription support (12-plus languages) and low claimed latency (roughly 300ms) for surfacing live suggestions during a fast-moving conversation
Cons
- −Its founding premise and original marketing were built explicitly around helping people cheat, in job interviews, sales calls, and exams, and its founders were suspended from Columbia University for a nearly identical earlier product; this history is directly relevant to evaluating what the product is actually built to do well
- −A 2025 data breach exposed personal data, interview transcripts, and screenshots from more than 83,000 users after an admin credential was left in a public GitHub repository, a serious concern given the sensitivity of what Cluely captures by design (resumes, screen content, live audio)
- −In March 2026, CEO Roy Lee publicly admitted that a previously claimed $7 million ARR figure was inflated, later acknowledging it as false; this is a real, documented credibility issue for a company asking users to trust it with confidential call content
- −Real-world accuracy falls short of marketing claims according to multiple independent testers: a claimed 95% transcription accuracy is reported closer to 60-80% in practice, and live-answer quality is described by more than one hands-on reviewer as generic, too short, or laggy in actual use
- −The "Undetectability" tier costs $149.99 a month, roughly 7.5 times the base Pro price, specifically to hide the overlay from screen-share software, a pricing structure several independent reviewers note is a difficult thing to justify to any manager or client if the use case is legitimate and disclosed
- −No interview or exam preparation functionality exists at all, no question bank, no practice mode, no coaching, it's purely a live-assistance tool, meaning it offers no path to actually building the skill or knowledge the interview or exam is meant to assess
Cluely needs a different kind of review than most tools on this site, because its origin and business model are inseparable from the product itself. It was founded in April 2025 by Chungin “Roy” Lee, Neel Shanmugam, and Alex Chen, months after Lee and Shanmugam were suspended from Columbia University for building Interview Coder, a Chrome extension that fed AI-generated answers during technical coding interviews. Cluely launched under the tagline “Cheat on Everything,” with a launch video showing Lee using the tool on a date to fabricate his age, knowledge, and career, and pulled 70,000 signups in its first week largely on the strength of that controversy. Since then, the company has raised over $120 million (including a $15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz), pivoted its public positioning toward a more conventional “AI meeting assistant” framing, and added features like CRM integrations and a less invasive Desktop Widget mode. For this review, we looked at Cluely’s own pricing and feature pages, independent hands-on tests, and its documented history, including a 2025 data breach and a 2026 admission from its CEO about inflated revenue figures.
What Cluely actually does
Cluely is a desktop app for Mac and Windows (plus a newer iOS app) that reads your screen via OCR and captures system audio and microphone input during a live call, feeds that context to an LLM, and surfaces suggested answers, talking points, or notes through a small overlay window. Its defining technical feature is that the overlay is rendered through low-level GPU hooks (DirectX on Windows, Metal on macOS), which keeps it invisible to the screen-share and recording functions in Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, a genuinely more advanced approach than a simple always-on-top window, according to multiple independent technical reviews. It works across sales calls, job interviews, exams, coding assessments, and general business meetings, and post-rebrand it also generates meeting notes and drafts follow-up emails after a call ends.
Why this needs direct treatment before anything else
Using Cluely, or any tool like it, during a job interview, a proctored exam, a certification test, or a graded assessment is a serious integrity violation at the overwhelming majority of institutions and employers, and the consequences of being caught are asymmetric: a damaged reputation, a rescinded offer, academic discipline, or worse, against a marginal edge that multiple independent hands-on testers describe as inconsistent in practice. This isn’t a minor caveat buried in a features list. Proctoring services including Honorlock have published detection guides specifically targeting Cluely, and recruiter-side detection tools reportedly train against it by name because of how well-known the brand has become, meaning the “undetectable” premise the product is sold on is actively being tested and, according to several independent reviewers, sometimes fails in practice: one detailed hands-on tester reported being “spotted in the test meetings when sharing my full screen” despite the paid undetectability tier.
Pricing breakdown
Cluely’s Starter tier is free and includes a limited number of daily AI responses, limited notetaking, and up to 3 custom uploaded files. The Pro tier costs $19.99 a month billed monthly, or roughly $11.99 a month billed annually, and removes those caps, unlocking unlimited AI responses, unlimited notetaking, unlimited file uploads, and access to current frontier models. The Pro + Undetectability tier jumps sharply to $149.99 a month billed monthly, or roughly $44.99 a month annually, adding the screen-share-invisible overlay on top of everything in Pro, a large price gap for a single feature. A separate Mobile plan for the iOS app runs $8 a week, adding roughly $32 a month on top of any desktop subscription. An Enterprise tier runs $200 a month and adds role-based access control, SSO, custom integrations, and centralized billing and analytics.
Who should consider it
Cluely is worth considering only for narrow, fully disclosed use cases, a sales team that has openly adopted it as a coaching tool with everyone’s knowledge, or an individual using it for private, non-evaluative rehearsal where no one else’s trust or judgment is being deceived. It is not something we can responsibly recommend for interviews, exams, certifications, or any assessment where the point of the exercise is evaluating your own unaided knowledge or skill, both because of the integrity and consequence risk involved and because independent testing suggests the “undetectable” premise doesn’t hold up reliably in practice. For legitimate business meeting notetaking without any of this baggage, dedicated tools built and marketed around transparency, not concealment, are a better starting point.
Key Features
- GPU-level overlay rendering designed to stay invisible during screen-share and recording
- Live, hotkey-triggered AI answers grounded in uploaded custom files
- Post-call meeting notes, action items, and drafted follow-up emails
- Works across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Slack Huddles
- 12+ language transcription with claimed low-latency live responses
- Desktop Widget mode positioned as a less invasive, more conventional notetaking option
Platforms
macOS, Windows, iOS
Integrations
Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho
Best For
Verdict
Cluely is a technically real, well-funded product, and its overlay rendering genuinely does what it claims on the screen-share-detection front better than most alternatives attempt. But the product can't be fairly evaluated on features and pricing alone, given that its founding team was disciplined by a university for building an earlier version of exactly this idea, its original marketing explicitly celebrated deception as the point, and it has since experienced a data breach exposing tens of thousands of users' most sensitive interview and call content, plus a public admission from its own CEO about inflated revenue figures. If you're evaluating Cluely for an interview or an exam, understand clearly that this crosses into serious academic and professional integrity territory at most institutions and employers, that the consequences of detection are real and asymmetric, and that independent testing suggests the "undetectable" promise doesn't hold reliably in practice anyway. For legitimate, fully disclosed business use, cheaper, less controversial, purpose-built meeting tools on this site cover the same practical ground without any of this history attached.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it ethical or safe to use Cluely during a job interview?
No, and this deserves a direct answer rather than a hedge. Using a hidden AI assistant during a job interview is dishonest to the interviewer and violates the terms most companies expect candidates to operate under, and detection carries real, asymmetric consequences, a rescinded offer or a damaged professional reputation, against a marginal advantage that independent testers describe as inconsistent in practice.
Is Cluely actually undetectable during screen sharing?
Not reliably, according to independent testing. While the GPU-level overlay rendering is a genuinely more sophisticated technical approach than simpler tools, at least one detailed hands-on tester reported being spotted during a test meeting while sharing their full screen, and proctoring and recruiter-detection services have published specific guides for identifying Cluely use.
What happened in Cluely's 2025 data breach?
Hackers accessed Cluely's systems after an admin credential was left exposed in a public GitHub repository, exposing personal data, interview transcripts, and screenshots from more than 83,000 users. Given that Cluely is designed to capture resumes, screen content, and live audio by default, this is a genuinely serious incident worth weighing heavily if you're considering trusting it with confidential material.
Did Cluely's CEO really admit to inflating revenue figures?
Yes. In March 2026, CEO Roy Lee publicly claimed $7 million in annual recurring revenue, then acknowledged that figure was false, with screenshots he posted suggesting the real number was closer to $5.2 million. This is documented and worth factoring into how much weight to give the company's other public claims.
Is there a legitimate, non-controversial alternative to Cluely for business meetings?
Yes, and it's worth strongly considering instead. Dedicated meeting notetakers built around transparency rather than concealment, several reviewed elsewhere on this site, cover legitimate note-taking, transcription, and follow-up generation without Cluely's founding history, breach record, or the ethical weight attached to its "undetectable" premise.