Ari Helper

One Place for all of your AI Conversations ran locally, self hosted or even leveraging the cloud

Introducing Ari - Your Easy-to-Use AI Assistant!

Meet Ari, your personal AI assistant, right on your device! Similar to ChatGPT-5 and other popular AI assistants, Ari operates entirely offline, meaning no need for an internet connection.

Your privacy is our priority – Ari doesn't collect any of your personal data.

Start Ari anywhere with Siri and App Intents — just say "Ask Ari," speak your question, and hear the answer back.

Power users get a full Shortcuts catalog: Ask Ari with any model (Apple Intelligence, local, or cloud), start chats, generate and edit images, analyze PDFs, speak replies, change settings, queue Code Session tasks on Mac, and dispatch prompts to other devices — all chainable in Shortcuts.

Ari is on your wrist too: the Apple Watch app remote-controls Ari on iPhone. Dictate from the "Ask Ari" complication or Smart Stack, watch answers stream in, hear them spoken, and hand long replies to iPhone. Questions queue when the phone is away; private chats stay off the watch.

Conversations show up in Spotlight — including by what's in their images. Ari reads text and objects in chat pictures on-device so you can search for "that screenshot with the receipt". Private media is never indexed. With Sensitive Content Warning on, flagged images blur behind "Show Anyway" (verified adults can opt out).

More to love: Text-to-Speech (device voice or Ava); long-press to copy or retry across models; syntax highlighting with one-tap code copy; Previous Chats synced via iCloud.

On Apple Intelligence (iOS 26 / macOS 26), Ari uses the on-device foundation model by default — private, no API key, no network. Attach images: the model can't see pixels directly, so Ari describes them on-device with the Vision framework (text, tables, barcodes, subjects). Prefer full vision models? Pick one from the menu.

Download on-device models with a tap. First launch can install Google's Gemma 4 vision model sized to your device. Or paste a model URL. Self-host with Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible server — LM Studio, vLLM, llama.cpp, LiteLLM — by entering its address, or generate images with DrawThings over gRPC.

Cloud providers with your own keys: OpenAI (GPT-5 family and GPT Image), xAI Grok (4.5 plus Grok Imagine), Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini (plus Imagen and Veo), and AWS Bedrock. Image-capable models accept photos; import text and source files. Cloud use reminds you each provider's privacy policy applies.

On Mac, open a Code Session on a project folder with Grok for agentic tools — read, edit, search, git, shell, browser, web, and MCP — so Ari's GUI agent matches a terminal coding agent.

Note: For strongest privacy with iCloud sync, enable Advanced Data Protection. Without it, conversations stay limited to your iCloud account but are not fully end-to-end encrypted.

Optionally powered by Gemma 4 (HuggingFace) for offline chat and image understanding.

Download Ari and keep your AI assistant at your fingertips!