Why it is uncertain
Some documents and recordings cannot leave the building. Local models are smaller than hosted ones, and the honest answer to “is local good enough” depends on the task, the language and the hardware. It has to be measured case by case.
Method
- Build the local version as a real tool that people use daily, then measure it.
- Keep every service behind a standard interface, so a local model and a hosted one can be swapped and compared on the same inputs.
- Publish the code and the benchmark harness.
What we measure
- Quality against a hosted baseline on the same inputs.
- Latency on ordinary hardware.
- What still has to leave the perimeter, if anything.
Results so far
- Voice typing that runs entirely on a Mac, released as open source, with a local server that speaks the standard audio interface.
- Embedding and reranking services that serve several of our projects from one machine.
- A call-analytics reference stack that keeps audio and transcripts on the owner’s disks.
- A private chat workspace that routes to models the owner chooses.
Next
A one-command installation of the search stack on a client’s Linux machine.