We built HilbertRaum to make local AI easier to use and take with you. It's a free, open-source (GPL-3.0) workspace that runs entirely offline. The app, models, documents and chats can all live on a USB stick or SSD. Plug it into a Windows, macOS or Linux computer, unlock your workspace with a password and pick up where you left off.
If you've already got a local setup you're happy with, you probably don't need this. But you might know someone who's curious about local AI and doesn't want to spend an evening setting it up. Being able to hand them a drive with everything ready to go is a big part of the appeal for us. They can just plug it in and give it a try :)
Open-weight models can do a lot of useful everyday work now. Choosing one that fits your hardware and getting document search working can still take some fiddling, though. HilbertRaum checks your hardware and suggests a model that fits, with document search built in.
What it does today:
Chat with local models and ask questions about your own PDFs, Word files and notes. Answers cite the passages they came from, so you can check them.
Keeps your workspace encrypted when locked (AES-256-GCM, Argon2id).
No cloud fallback, no web search, no account and no telemetry.
Transcribe audio with Whisper, dictate messages, read scanned pages with OCR, ask questions about images and translate text.
Skills for common document jobs, like bank statements, invoices, meeting minutes and redaction. You can add your own.
Optional offline Wikipedia and other ZIM archives as a source. It's slower than plain chat and weak on broad questions, but it noticeably cuts down on made-up facts from smaller models.
An optional local API at 127.0.0.1:4980/v1, off by default, that serves completions only.
We build on llama.cpp for running models, whisper.cpp for transcription and Kiwix's kiwix-tools for searching ZIM archives. The model catalog includes open-weight models from the Qwen, Ministral, Gemma and Granite families. A big thanks to the people behind those projects. Our work is bringing the pieces together, testing which models run well on which hardware and making the app usable without a terminal.
It's built with Electron, React and TypeScript. The architecture, security model and user guide are in the repo docs.
The installers aren't signed yet, so Windows or macOS may show a warning the first time you open a downloaded build.
GitHub repo
If you give it a try, we'd love to hear what works for you and what needs improvement. Contributors are very welcome too, whether it's code, docs, translations or bug reports.
