BlogThought Leadership

AI That Runs on Your Computer, Not in the Cloud

·6 min read

Every major AI assistant in 2026 works the same way: you type a message, it goes to a data center, a model processes it, and a response comes back. Your prompts, your files, your conversations — all living on someone else's servers.

Vox takes a different approach.

What “local-first” actually means

When we say Vox is local-first, we mean the parts that involve your data stay on your machine. Specifically:

Vox — Local Architecture
✓Wake word detection — 3-stage ONNX pipeline, fully on-deviceDone
✓Knowledge base — SQLite FTS5, stored on your hard driveDone
✓File operations — direct local filesystem accessDone
✓Voice overlay — runs in local Electron processDone

Your microphone data never leaves your machine until you intentionally activate a command. Documents you add to Vox are indexed on your hard drive, not uploaded to a vector database in the cloud. When you ask Vox to use a document, only the relevant excerpts are sent for reasoning. File reads and writes happen directly on your disk.

AI that runs on your Mac

Vox runs Qwen3 locally via llama.cpp — the AI model itself lives on your machine. You can choose from 4B, 8B, 14B, or 32B parameter variants depending on your hardware. There are no cloud API calls, no passive data collection, no background upload, no ambient recording. Everything stays on your Mac.

Cloud-First AI
  • Audio streamed to cloud 24/7
  • Files uploaded to remote servers
  • Knowledge base in vendor's cloud
  • Vendor controls your data lifecycle
Vox (Local-First)
  • Wake word runs on-device via ONNX
  • Files stay local by default
  • SQLite + FTS5 on your hard drive
  • You control everything, always

Why this matters now

In 2025, Rewind AI — a company that recorded your entire screen and stored it in the cloud — was acquired by Meta. Users who trusted the product with their most sensitive data suddenly found it in the hands of the world's largest advertising company.

Note

If your AI assistant's business model depends on your data living on their servers, you're one acquisition away from losing control.

Local-first isn't a feature — it's a philosophy. Your data should live where you live: on your machine, under your control, always.

Download Vox for Mac for free.

Keep reading
Why Privacy-First AI Matters More Than EverLocal vs Cloud AI — Which Actually Performs Better?Setting Up Your Personal Knowledge Base

Put Vox to work on your computer.

Download Vox for Mac and start with the local setup flow.

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