Local AI Text Assistant with Ollama (Offline)

There’s exactly one way to guarantee your text never leaves your computer: run the model on your computer. No cloud, no network, no third party — the AI lives on your own hardware. The most popular on-ramp to this is Ollama, and it’s more approachable than most people expect.

What “local” really buys you

When an AI model runs locally, your selected text is processed entirely on your machine. It never touches the internet. You could unplug your network cable, lose your Wi-Fi, sit on a plane, and still fix grammar, rewrite a sentence, or summarize a paragraph. For genuinely sensitive material — privileged legal text, patient information, unreleased code, anything you simply cannot send to a server — this is the strongest privacy posture that exists. There is no “trust the vendor” step because there is no vendor in the loop.

What Ollama is

Ollama is a free, open-source tool that downloads and runs open-weight language models on your own machine. Open-weight models are AI models whose files are published for anyone to run locally — names you’ll see include Llama (Meta), Mistral, Qwen, Gemma, and Phi. Ollama handles the awkward parts (fetching the model, loading it, exposing a simple local endpoint), so a writing tool can talk to a model running quietly in the background on localhost.

The basic flow is short:

1. Install Ollama for your OS (Mac, Windows, or Linux).
2. Pull a model — for example ollama pull llama3.1 or a smaller, faster model for quick edits.
3. Point your writing tool at the local Ollama endpoint (it runs on your machine, typically http://localhost:11434).

From then on, edits run locally. No key, no subscription for the model itself, no data leaving the box.

The honest trade-offs

Local is the privacy winner, but it isn’t free of cost:

• Quality. Local open-weight models are smaller than frontier cloud models. They’re excellent at grammar fixes, tone tweaks, and short rewrites; they’re weaker on long, nuanced, multi-paragraph reasoning. Match the task to the model.
• Hardware. You need a reasonably capable machine. A 7–8B-parameter model wants ~8 GB of RAM minimum; bigger models want more, and a GPU (or Apple Silicon’s unified memory) makes them noticeably faster. On a thin, old laptop, local will feel slow.
• Setup. It’s more hands-on than a cloud tool — a one-time install and model pull, plus picking the right model size for your hardware.
• Disk space. Models are multi-gigabyte files.

The smartest pattern: local for sensitive, cloud for hard

You don’t have to choose all-or-nothing. The mature approach is routing: keep trivial, sensitive edits on the local model and reserve the cloud (with your permission) for the genuinely hard rewrites that need a frontier model. A typo fix on a confidential document never needs to leave your machine; a delicate, long restructure might be worth the cloud round-trip. That’s covered in Smart local↔cloud routing for sensitive text, and the broader self-hosting picture is in Self-hosted / on-device AI writing options.

When local is the right call

Reach for a local model when:

• You handle text you are contractually or legally barred from sending to a cloud service.
• You work offline often, or in air-gapped environments.
• You want zero per-edit cost after the hardware you already own.
• Your edits are mostly quick fixes where a smaller model is plenty.

Stick with cloud (managed or BYOK) when you need top-tier quality on hard tasks and your text isn’t restricted.

EditSnappy and local models

EditSnappy’s whole reason to exist is reliable, safe inline editing for people who treat their text as sensitive — exactly the audience that asks for a local/offline option. Local-model support is on the privacy roadmap as the strongest version of that promise, but it is not yet a confirmed shipping feature:

[[MISSING: confirm whether EditSnappy ships local-model / Ollama support. master-sales-copy lists “smart local↔cloud routing” only as a reach goal (§5); local-model support is a silo topic, not a confirmed capability. Teach Ollama generally; do not assert EditSnappy runs locally until Ken confirms.]]

What’s committed today regardless: no logging or retention of your text, a diff shown before any change commits, and one-key undo — so even on a cloud path, you stay in control of every word.

See the full trust stack on the Privacy, Security & BYOK hub, or try EditSnappy free — no credit card.