How to use an AI assistant offline on Windows, privately

Most AI chat tools work by sending everything you type to a company's servers, where the answer is written and sent back. An offline assistant turns that around: the AI model sits on your own PC and does its work there. Nothing has to leave your machine, and it keeps working with the internet switched off.

What "offline AI" actually means

An AI assistant is two things: the app you type into, and the model that writes the answers. With a cloud chatbot the model lives in a data centre, so your questions, the documents you paste and the pictures you upload travel there to be processed. With an offline assistant the model is a file on your own drive, and your processor or graphics card runs it.

That has three practical effects. Your words and files stay on your PC. It works on a plane, on a train or on a locked down office network. And there is no per message cost or usage cap, because the work is done by hardware you already own.

What your PC needs

1. Memory first. The model has to fit in memory while it runs. 4 to 8 GB of RAM is enough for the small models built for laptops, and 16 GB or more leaves room for your other apps at the same time.
2. A graphics card helps, but is not required. A dedicated graphics card with its own memory writes answers several times faster than the processor alone. Without one, answers still arrive, just more slowly.
3. Storage for the model. Models built for home PCs are usually a few gigabytes. An SSD makes the first load noticeably quicker.
4. Speed is measured in tokens per second. A token is roughly three quarters of a word. Around 10 tokens per second reads comfortably as it streams in; a modern graphics card can manage many times that.

Where offline AI wins, and where it does not

Be clear about the trade. Models small enough to run on a PC know less than the largest cloud models, and they cannot look anything up on the web, so they know nothing that happened after they were trained. They can also be confidently wrong, which is true of every AI model, so check anything that matters.

Where they shine is the everyday work most people actually use AI for:

• Writing. Drafting and tidying emails, rewriting a paragraph in a different tone, proofreading and summarising.
• Learning. Explaining a topic at your level, making practice questions and working through maths step by step.
• Code. Explaining an error, suggesting a fix or writing a small function, without your code ever leaving the machine.
• Your own documents. Asking questions of a PDF or a report you would never paste into a public chatbot.

How to check that nothing leaves your PC

"Private" is easy to claim, so it is worth checking for yourself:

1. Read the privacy policy. A genuinely offline app should say plainly that it makes no internet connections of its own, and name any it does make.
2. Watch the network. Open Resource Monitor (type resmon in the Start menu), go to the Network tab and tick the app's process while you ask it something. An offline assistant shows no connections to the internet while it answers.
3. Pull the plug. Turn on Airplane mode and ask a question. If the answer still arrives, the model really is on your PC.
4. Know where your history lives. Conversations should be stored on your own drive, with a clear way to delete them or switch history off.

Getting better answers from a local model

• Give it context. "Write a polite email to a client moving our meeting to Thursday" beats "write an email".
• Ask for the shape you want. A bullet list, a table, three sentences, or a step by step explanation.
• Break big jobs up. Outline first, then draft each part. Smaller models do their best work in focused steps.
• Hand it the source. For questions about a document, give it the document instead of asking from memory, so the answer comes from your file rather than a guess.

How XLUNA AI Assistant Pro handles this

XLUNA AI Assistant Pro ships with its model inside the app, so there is nothing to download or set up and it works with no internet at all. It covers chat, writing, translation, study tools with marked quizzes and flashcards, step by step maths, code help, and questions about your PDFs and Word files with page references. It reads your hardware and tells you honestly how fast it will run, uses your graphics card when you have one, and keeps every conversation on your PC. It makes no internet connections of its own. It is coming soon to the Microsoft Store.