Local AI Chat Apps and Assistants

ollama-telegram connects Telegram chats to a local LLM through Ollama. The project is archived and no longer maintained. It's for people who want to access their own model through Telegram, with the bot and model backend running on hardware or a server they control.

Discourse AI is the official AI plugin bundled with Discourse. Forum administrators can enable its features independently, including an AI bot, semantic search, topic and chat summaries, spam detection and writing assistance. It runs inside a Discourse community, which you can host on your own server.

Voxta is an AI companion for people who want a character they can talk to, give work to or use in interactive stories. You choose its personality, voice and optional avatar. The proprietary local-server edition has a browser interface, and AI processing can run entirely on your hardware, through Voxta Cloud or across a mix of local and cloud services.

Matrix ChatGPT Bot connects Matrix rooms to OpenAI's ChatGPT API for people who want AI conversations in their existing chat client, including Element. The project is archived and no longer maintained. It's open source under AGPL-3.0, and the maintainers point users to Baibot as an alternative.

Open-LLM-VTuber is a local AI companion for people who want a character they can talk to, with a Live2D avatar that responds through speech and expressions. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux through web and desktop clients. With local models for speech and language processing, it works fully offline and keeps conversations on your device. Cloud APIs are optional alternatives that send the corresponding processing to external services.

Amica is a locally runnable interface for talking with customizable 3D AI characters. It's for people who want an animated, voiced character as the face of their AI assistant, with a choice of local LLM backends or cloud services. The project builds on Pixiv's ChatVRM.

Mikupad is a browser-based LLM frontend packaged as a single HTML file, for writers and people who want control over generated text. It connects to a model backend of your choice and supports both direct text continuation and chat with instruct models. It's open source under AGPL-3.0.

ShellGPT is an AI terminal assistant for developers and people who work with shell commands. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, turning plain-language requests into commands suited to your operating system and shell. You can review, explain or execute its suggestions, and its Bash and Zsh integrations put generated commands into the terminal input line for editing.

Agnai is a self-hosted AI roleplay chat app for people who want to create fictional characters and talk with them alone or in a group. A conversation can include multiple people and multiple bots. It builds on early work from Galatea-UI by PygmalionAI and uses the AGPL-3.0 open-source license.

RisuAI is an open-source AI roleplay client for people who want to create characters, build fictional worlds and chat with several characters together. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and in a browser. You can also host the web app yourself with Docker.

tlm is an open source terminal assistant for people who want help writing shell commands and understanding unfamiliar ones. It runs models on your workstation through Ollama, so command assistance doesn't depend on a cloud service. It works offline and requires no API key or subscription.

MindMac is a native macOS AI chat client for people who want to use local LLMs and cloud services in the same app. Its inline mode lets you ask questions or generate text inside Notes, Mail and browsers without switching to a chat window. It runs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 13 or newer.

TypingMind is a browser chat frontend for people who want to choose their model providers and manage conversations in one place. It connects to cloud APIs such as OpenAI, Claude and Gemini, and supports custom endpoints for locally hosted models such as Ollama and LocalAI. The frontend does not run model inference itself.

mods is a command-line AI tool for people who want to ask questions about command output or use model responses in shell pipelines. It connects to local LLMs through LocalAI as well as cloud services. The project is archived and no longer maintained.

Pieces runs in the background on your computer and builds a searchable history of your work across apps. It's for people who need to recover a decision, find earlier research or resume a task after switching between tools. Memories stay on your machine by default.

Backyard AI's desktop app uses llama.cpp, a runtime for running language models locally. It's for people looking for a desktop AI app on Windows or macOS, with separate Mac downloads for Intel and Apple Silicon hardware.

5ire is a free desktop AI assistant that combines chat, a local document knowledge base and MCP tools. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, with Mac downloads for Apple Silicon and Intel. It's for people who want to use their own documents and external tools alongside conversations with local or cloud models.

Ollamac is a native macOS chat app for people who want to use Ollama models through a desktop interface. It works with all models supported by Ollama and can run offline through a local Ollama installation. Ollama handles the model execution; Ollamac provides the interface for conversations.

Serge is a self-hosted chat interface for people who want to run language models on their own hardware and talk to them in a browser. The project is archived and no longer maintained. It uses llama.cpp to run models locally, with Alpaca as a named chat model and LLaMA also referenced in its memory requirements.

LlamaGPT is a self-hosted ChatGPT alternative for people who want general chat or coding help on their own computer or home server. It runs models locally and keeps conversation data on your device. After the initial model download, it works offline.

Layla is an offline AI assistant for Android and iOS that runs language models on your phone. It's for people who want private everyday chat or an AI companion with custom characters, memory and roleplay. Local conversations stay encrypted on your device; optional cloud mode sends requests to your chosen hosted provider.

Lollms WebUI is a local, single-user AI interface for people who want text chat and media generation in one place. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, with Docker support, and lets writers, developers and other users choose models and task-specific personalities. It's free and open source under Apache 2.0. The project receives minimal maintenance.

Chatbot UI is a browser-based AI chat app for people who want to host their own interface and choose between local models and cloud providers. It connects to Ollama for models running on your hardware, alongside services such as OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini. The app is open source under the MIT license.

MNN is a lightweight C++ framework for developers who want AI models to run on phones, PCs and embedded devices. It handles inference and training on the device, with a focus on small application footprints and hardware acceleration. The project is open source under Apache 2.0, and Alibaba uses it in apps including Taobao, Youku and DingTalk.

NextChat is a self-hosted AI chat interface for people who want one place to use their own LLM server and cloud models. The web and desktop project is open source under the MIT license. You can host it with Docker or on Vercel, and desktop clients run on macOS, Windows and Linux.

LLM Farm runs large language models offline on iOS and macOS. It's for people who want on-device AI chat or need to compare how different models perform on Apple hardware before choosing one for a project. The app is open source under the MIT license, with ggml and llama.cpp handling local inference.

LLaVA is a family of vision-language models for researchers and developers who want to ask questions about images on their own hardware. It pairs a CLIP vision encoder with a language model to support image descriptions, visual reasoning and reading text in pictures. Its Python code is open source under Apache 2.0; the project places research-use restrictions on its data and checkpoints, with additional terms from the underlying models.

NativeMind brings a local AI assistant into Chrome for people who want help with webpages, documents, and writing without sending that content to a cloud model. The browser extension connects to Ollama on your machine, keeping prompts and AI processing on-device. It requires no account and uses the AGPL-3.0 open-source license.

Private LLM runs AI chat entirely on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. It's an app for people who want to use language models without sending their conversations to a cloud service. After the first model download, it works offline and requires no account. Conversations stay on-device, with no tracking or logs.

GLaDOS is a local AI voice assistant modeled on the sarcastic character from Valve's Portal games. It's for people who want a conversational companion on their own hardware, with camera awareness and connections to home automation. The Python project is open source under the MIT license and runs on Linux and Windows. macOS support is experimental.

Hollama is an open-source LLM chat app whose interface runs entirely in your browser. It's for people who want to chat with local AI through Ollama or connect to OpenAI servers, with support for multiple server connections. The interface stores data locally in the browser; the connected server handles model requests, so where inference runs depends on the server you choose.

Page Assist brings local AI chat into your browser, with a sidebar for conversations alongside a webpage and a separate tab for a ChatGPT-style interface. It's for people who already run models on their own hardware and want to ask questions about what they're reading without leaving the page.

HuggingChat UI is the open-source chat application behind Hugging Face's hosted HuggingChat. You can run it on your own computer or server and connect it to a local LLM backend or a cloud provider. It's for people and teams who want a browser-based ChatGPT alternative with control over the chat service and where its data lives. The code uses the Apache 2.0 license.

Unmute adds spoken conversation to text LLMs using Kyutai's speech recognition and speech synthesis models. It's for developers who want a self-hosted voice interface while keeping their choice of language model. The project uses the MIT license, and a hosted browser demo is available at Unmute.sh.

Fullmoon is an open source chat app for people who want to run language models on their Apple devices and keep conversations local. It supports iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS, with on-device inference optimized for Apple silicon. You can chat fully offline, and the app saves your chat history locally.

IntelliBar is an AI assistant for Mac that brings local models and cloud services into one desktop app. It's for people who want to write, proofread, or ask questions without switching between separate chat apps. Ollama support lets you run models locally and keep prompts away from remote providers.