Local AI Apps and Tools for Mac

XTTS v2 generates speech from text using a reference voice recording or a preset speaker. It runs locally through Coqui TTS and suits developers building speech into apps, as well as researchers who want to fine-tune a speech model on their own hardware.

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.

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 The project is archived and no longer maintained.

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.

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.

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.

Sonar is a self-hosted inference engine for developers and teams serving Hugging Face-compatible language and multimodal models on their own hardware. Based on vLLM, it adds model and quantization formats, sampling methods, and deployment features. It's open source under AGPL-3.0.

Nexa SDK is an on-device AI inference framework for developers building applications that process text, images or audio on users' hardware. It runs models locally across CPUs, GPUs and NPUs, with a shared interface for different backends. Its scope includes language and vision models, speech recognition, speech synthesis and image generation.

DB-GPT is a self-hosted AI data assistant for teams analyzing business data and developers building data applications. It turns plain-language requests into SQL queries and Python analysis, then produces charts, dashboards, or HTML reports. You can run it on macOS or Linux, with Docker deployment also supported.

BotSharp is a self-hosted framework for .NET developers building AI agents into business applications. Written in C#, it runs on Windows, Linux and macOS and is open source software under Apache 2.0. Its plugin design lets teams choose their model provider, storage and interface while keeping agent coordination in the same framework.

lm-evaluation-harness lets researchers and model developers compare language models using shared academic benchmarks and public prompts. It runs evaluations against local models and benchmarks, or sends requests to a hosted model API. EleutherAI's Python framework is open source under the MIT license and powers Hugging Face's Open LLM Leaderboard.

SwarmUI is a self-hosted AI image generation interface that combines a straightforward generation screen with direct access to ComfyUI's node-based workflows. It's for people who want to run creative models on their own hardware, with room to build more detailed workflows as their needs grow.

Unstructured is a local document processing library for developers building LLM applications and document ingestion pipelines. It turns PDFs, Word documents, HTML, emails and images into document elements that applications can use. The Python library is open source under Apache 2.0 and runs on your own hardware, including through Docker images for x86_64 and Apple Silicon.

USearch is an open-source similarity search library for developers building semantic search, recommendation systems, and other applications that compare vectors. It runs within your application on your own hardware or server. Its compact C++ core supports custom definitions of similarity, including comparisons between combined image and text embeddings or geospatial data.

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.

Falcon-H1 is a family of language models from the Technology Innovation Institute for developers building local AI applications or serving models on their own hardware. Its hybrid design combines attention with Mamba2 state space models to reduce memory use and speed up inference. Model sizes cover smaller devices and larger server deployments.

MiniCPM-V is a family of local vision-language models for developers building apps that interpret images and video on their own hardware. It supports iOS, Android and HarmonyOS, as well as Mac deployment and server inference. The current repository states that MiniCPM-o/V code and model weights use Apache 2.0.

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.

Parler-TTS generates speech locally, with text descriptions that control how the voice sounds. It's a Python library for developers building speech into applications and researchers who want to train or adapt a TTS model. The library uses the Apache 2.0 license and can run on CPU or CUDA GPUs, with support for Apple Silicon.

Spark-TTS is a local text-to-speech system that can copy a voice from reference audio or create a synthetic speaker with adjustable vocal traits. It's for developers and researchers building speech applications, including personalized narration, assistive technology, and language research. The Python and PyTorch code is open source under Apache 2.0.

IOPaint is a free, self-hosted AI image editor for people who want to remove objects, replace parts of a picture or extend it beyond its original edges on their own hardware. The project is archived and no longer maintained. It's open source under Apache 2.0, with a browser interface and support for CPU, GPU and Apple Silicon hardware.

Tortoise TTS is a local text-to-speech system for developers and creators who want speech with varied voices and natural pacing. It uses reference audio clips to guide a custom voice, with an emphasis on expressive rhythm and intonation.

NotebookLlama is a self-hosted NotebookLM alternative for people who want to work with documents through an app they can host and modify. Its browser interface runs locally, while LlamaCloud provides document extraction and indexing. It requires cloud services.

LiteRT is Google's open-source framework for developers building AI into apps that run on users' own devices. It succeeds TensorFlow Lite and covers model conversion, optimization and local inference. It's licensed under Apache 2.0.

ncnn is a C++ framework for developers building on-device AI into mobile, desktop and embedded applications. Its focus is running neural networks with a small memory footprint and no third-party runtime dependencies. Models run on the target device's CPU or a supported Vulkan GPU.

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.

PyTorch Lightning is a Python framework for researchers and developers who want to pretrain or fine-tune models on their own hardware or in the cloud. It handles repetitive training code while leaving model logic under your control. The framework is open source under Apache 2.0.

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.