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Local inference

OpenHuman Local AI

Optional and off by default. When enabled, local AI drives memory embeddings, summary-tree building, and lightweight tasks. Heavy workloads still route to cloud providers unless you configure otherwise.

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OpenHuman Local AI

Practical notes for evaluating a fast-moving open-source AI assistant.

Practical, source-linked OpenHuman guidance

What Local AI Can Do

OpenHuman's local AI feature routes selected workloads to Ollama or LM Studio on your machine instead of cloud providers. It is opt-in and off by default. When enabled, memory embeddings, summary-tree building, and lightweight chat run locally. Heavy reasoning, coding, vision, and voice still route to cloud frontier models unless you explicitly configure otherwise.

  • Local: memory embeddings, summary-tree building, background reflection, lightweight chat, classification.
  • Cloud (default): heavy reasoning, coding, agentic tasks, vision, ElevenLabs TTS, web search.
  • Default model: Gemma 3 1B, requiring ~2 GB RAM and a few GB disk space.
  • Override: set local_ai.provider and local_ai.base_url in config.toml for custom setups.

Setup

Enable local AI in Settings, then choose a preset matching how much workload stays on-device.

  • Path: Settings → AI & Skills → Local AI.
  • Three presets: embeddings only; memory plus reflection; or full local where supported.
  • Override provider and base URL with local_ai.provider and local_ai.base_url in config.toml.
  • The default local model is Gemma 3 1B, which needs a few gigabytes of RAM and disk space.

Hardware and Tradeoffs

Local AI pays off when you have heavy email or chat ingestion, need offline summaries, or want privacy-sensitive background reflection. Skip it on limited hardware with only a few connected sources.

  • Worth it: heavy mail or chat ingestion, offline summaries, privacy-sensitive reflection, or an existing GPU.
  • Skip it: few connected sources, no GPU, limited RAM, or workflows locked to cloud features like vision and voice.
  • Known issue: on Windows 11 with an existing Ollama server, the UI shows the Ollama URL as read-only. Edit config.toml directly.
  • LM Studio support: check current release notes for confirmed vs. planned features.