RecurseChat

RecurseChat runs AI chats on your own Mac. Nothing has to leave the machine, and it works offline.

It is a personal AI chatbot app that talks to local language models and lets you chat with your documents, including PDFs, markdown files and images.

You can switch between several AI models, change how the app looks, and adjust the personality of the AI you are talking to.

Full-text search across your chats is fast, which matters once the history grows.

The app is meant to be simple to start with, though it relies on local LLMs, so getting a model running the first time may take some technical know-how.

Answer quality also depends on whichever local model you choose, not on RecurseChat itself.

It requires macOS, so Windows and Linux users are out.

If privacy is the main reason you want a chat assistant, the local-only approach is the draw.