Runs 100% on your machine
Chaty loads any .gguf model and runs it locally — chat, a private
knowledge base, multi-round Deep Research, and voice. No account, no cloud,
no telemetry. Your conversations stay on your disk.
Free & open source · All releases ↗
What's inside
Everything a cloud chatbot does — and several things it can't — without a single byte leaving your computer.
Load any .gguf and talk to it. The tokenizer and chat template come straight from the file. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged to a server — the model lives and runs on your hardware.
Cross-vendor Vulkan on Windows and Metal on Apple Silicon — auto-tuned to your VRAM, with a graceful CPU fallback when it won't fit.
Index PDFs, docs, code & images into a private store. Hybrid retrieval, strict grounding, and inline citations you can hover to verify.
Give it a topic; it runs multiple rounds of web search interleaved with reasoning, then writes a long, cited report — exportable to PDF or Markdown.
Speak and listen — local STT & TTS with 11 voices, silence auto-send, and a hands-free Live mode. Runs on CPU, never touching the model's VRAM.
A foldable <think> panel that follows the reasoning as it streams, KaTeX math, Mermaid diagrams, a playable HTML preview, per-block code copy, full-text search and Markdown/JSON export.
Knowledge base · RAG
Drop in PDFs, Markdown, code, even scanned images — Chaty chunks and embeds them locally with multilingual bge-m3 vectors. When the knowledge base is on, the model answers only from what it retrieved, and says so plainly when something isn't covered.
Deep Research
Hand Chaty a topic and watch it work: it plans queries, runs several rounds of web search interleaved with its own reasoning about what's still missing, then synthesizes a structured long-form report. References list only the sources it actually cited — and you can export the whole thing to PDF.
Privacy is the architecture
This isn't a setting you toggle — it's how Chaty is built. The model, your chats, your documents, and your knowledge base all live in local storage on your computer. There's no account to create and no server to trust.
The only time the network is touched is when you ask for it: optional web search, or a one-time model download. Turn those off and Chaty is fully offline.
Platforms
.dmgFree, open source, and yours to run forever. Pick your platform — the download tracks the latest release.
macOS is ad-hoc signed (not notarized). First launch needs one Gatekeeper step — see the FAQ.
Questions
Yes — Chaty is free and open source. You bring your own GGUF models (downloadable in-app from Hugging Face), and everything runs on your own machine. There's no subscription and no account.
Once you've downloaded a model, yes. The network is only used when you explicitly enable web search / Deep Research, or to fetch a model or the optional voice and embedding files. Disable those and Chaty never touches the internet.
Any .gguf file. There's first-class handling for Llama 3, Gemma 3 / 4, and Qwen 3 / 3.5 / 3.6 (including thinking control), plus a robust template fallback chain so unusual community models still chat.
A 64-bit Windows 10/11 PC or an Apple-Silicon Mac. Smaller quantized models run comfortably in 8 GB of RAM; larger models want more. Chaty auto-tunes GPU offload to your VRAM and refuses models that can't physically fit, so it won't freeze your system.
Chaty is ad-hoc signed but not notarized (there's no paid Apple Developer account behind it). Clear the download quarantine once in Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Chaty.appThen open it normally — or right-click the app, choose Open, and confirm via System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
In a local SQLite database in your user app-data folder. Nothing is synced anywhere. Delete the app data and it's gone — it was only ever on your disk.