Your first ten minutes.
chanio is an AI that lives on your own computer, answers from your own notes for free, and keeps everything as plain files you can open without it. Five steps. No account. No password prompts.
See it think, in your browser
On a laptop, open the demo. A small model downloads into the tab (a few hundred MB, once) and then answers right there. Try What is the capital of Chile? Then teach it one thing about you and ask again. Nothing you type leaves the tab; turn off wi-fi and it still answers.
Open the demo →Put it on your Mac
Open Terminal (press ⌘ Space, type Terminal, Return). Paste this line and press Return:
curl -fsSL https://chanio.com/install.sh | shIt downloads what it needs, tells you before each download, and never asks for your password. The model is about 2 GB, so the first run takes a few minutes on campus wi-fi. If the Ollama app opens a welcome window, you can close it; it keeps running in your menu bar. When it says Ready, open a new Terminal window (or run ~/chanio/bin/chanio directly).
Give it something to know
It answers from the folder ~/chanio/notes. Setup put one example file there, a made-up week, so your first question has something to find; delete it whenever you like. Run open ~/chanio/notes to see the folder in Finder, then drop in a few text or Markdown files: class notes, a plan, a list of things you are working on. Or copy any text on your screen and run chanio capture to save it as a note.
Already have a lot of ChatGPT or Claude history? Convert the export to Markdown (it runs in your browser) and drop the unzipped folder into the notes folder. The export takes a day or two to arrive from OpenAI, so request it early.
Ask it
In Terminal:
chanio ask "what is on my schedule this week?"It answers from your files and names the file it used, on your own Mac, for $0. When it cannot answer well it says Held for tonight instead of guessing. That is the design, not a failure: the nightly run sends the held questions out in one batch if you add a key, or packs them into a file you can paste into the AI you already use.
Read the brief. Check the meter.
At 5 a.m. (or when the Mac wakes) it compiles what changed into a short brief: what mattered, open threads, questions worth holding. chanio brief reads it. chanio meter shows what ran on your machine at $0 and what, if anything, was rented. Do not want to wait until morning? Run chanio nightly now and read the brief a few seconds later.
See the founder’s own meter →The model on your Mac is small. It is good at finding and summarizing what is in your notes and bad at hard reasoning or anything it never read; that is why the hard questions get held. It sometimes gets things wrong, so it always names the file it used. Everything it makes is a plain file in ~/chanio; delete that folder and chanio is gone. chanio uninstall removes only the nightly job.