Local models & bring your own key

Three ways to power OpenHuman: the managed subscription, your own provider key (BYOK), or fully local models via Ollama. What each one supports for chat, vision, and embeddings, and how to configure i

The OpenHuman subscription is the default, not a requirement. Inference can come from any of three places, and you can mix them per workload: run embeddings locally, chat on your own Anthropic key, and leave vision on the managed route, all at once.

This page covers how to set up the two self-owned options and, importantly, what each one can actually do. Not every local model can see images, and picking a chat-only model for vision work is the single most common way to end up with a setup that looks configured but quietly does the wrong thing.

The three routes at a glance

	Managed (default)	BYOK cloud	Local (Ollama / LM Studio)
Chat & reasoning	Included	Your key, your billing	Yes, quality scales with model size
Vision	Included	Your key, if the model supports images	Yes, but only with a vision-capable model
Embeddings	Included	Your key, if the provider serves embeddings	Yes, bge-m3 recommended
Speech to text	Included	Not routed through BYOK	Local Whisper available
Text to speech	Included	Not routed through BYOK	Local Piper available
Web search	Included, no key needed	Bring your own Exa key	Not applicable
Inference data leaves your machine	Yes, to the OpenHuman backend	Yes, to your chosen provider	No
API keys to manage	None	One per provider	None

That last row is deliberately about inference data only. Sign-in, managed integration OAuth, billing, and hosted features such as meeting agents still use the OpenHuman backend even when inference is entirely yours, so running local models is not by itself a guarantee that nothing leaves the machine. If you want a hard guarantee that no inference leaves the machine, use Privacy Mode, which enforces the local-only path in the Rust core rather than relying on configuration alone.

Route A: local models with Ollama

1. Install Ollama and pull a model

Install Ollama, then pull what you need. Every model named on this page is pullable from the public Ollama library with no extra setup:

ollama pull gemma3:1b-it-qat      # small chat model
ollama pull bge-m3                # embeddings
ollama pull moondream:1.8b-v2-q4_K_S   # vision, small

2. Know what each model supports

This is the part that bites people. A model that only does text will still accept an image request on Ollama: it silently drops the image and answers from the prompt text alone, which reads as a confident but entirely invented description. OpenHuman guards against this by refusing to route a vision request at a chat-only model, but it is worth knowing which is which.

Model	Download	Chat	Vision	Embeddings
gemma3:270m-it-qat	0.2 GB	Yes	No	No
gemma3:1b-it-qat	1.0 GB	Yes	No	No
gemma3:4b-it-qat	4.0 GB	Yes	Yes	No
gemma3n:e4b-it-q8_0	9.5 GB	Yes	No	No
gemma4:e4b-it-q8_0	11.6 GB	Yes	Yes	No
moondream:1.8b-v2-q4_K_S	1.7 GB	Minimal	Yes	No
llava:7b	4.7 GB	Minimal	Yes	No
bge-m3	1.2 GB	No	No	Yes, 1024 dim
all-minilm:latest	0.05 GB	No	No	384 dim, too small for Memory Tree

Two traps worth calling out:

• Gemma 3 is split by size. The 270M and 1B builds are text-only. Vision starts at 4B. Picking gemma3:1b-it-qat for vision gets you a text-only model.

• gemma3n is not gemma3. Despite the name, Gemma 3n is a separate, text-only model on Ollama. It is a fine chat model and a bad vision model.

For embeddings, prefer bge-m3. The Memory Tree stores vectors in a fixed 1024-dimension on-disk format, so a 384-dimension model such as all-minilm or a 768-dimension model such as nomic-embed-text will fail the dimension check at embed time.

3. Point OpenHuman at it

The quickest path is the desktop app: Settings → AI & Skills → Local AI exposes RAM tier presets that set every model ID for you and pull the weights. The tiers are:

Tier	Chat	Vision	Embeddings	Download
1 GB	gemma3:270m-it-qat	Disabled	all-minilm:latest (see note)	~0.3 GB
2-4 GB	gemma3:1b-it-qat	Disabled	bge-m3	~2.3 GB
4-8 GB	gemma3:1b-it-qat	moondream:1.8b-v2-q4_K_S	all-minilm:latest (see note)	~2.8 GB
8-16 GB	gemma3:4b-it-qat	gemma3:4b-it-qat	bge-m3	~5.2 GB
16 GB+	gemma4:e4b-it-q8_0	gemma4:e4b-it-q8_0	bge-m3	~12.8 GB

The two highest tiers use one multimodal model for both chat and vision, so you download a single set of weights rather than a chat model plus a separate vision sidecar.

The 1 GB and 4-8 GB tiers ship all-minilm:latest, which the Memory Tree cannot use. It emits 384-dimension vectors and the Memory Tree's on-disk format is fixed at 1024, so memory embedding fails the dimension check at embed time. Those two tiers are usable for local chat and, on the 4-8 GB tier, vision, but if you want local Memory Tree embeddings set embedding_model_id = "bge-m3" explicitly after applying the preset, or pick the 2-4 GB tier or above. Aligning those presets is tracked as follow-up.

To configure by hand, the keys live under [local_ai] in config.toml:

[local_ai]
runtime_enabled = true
opt_in_confirmed = true
provider = "ollama"                       # or "lm_studio"
chat_model_id = "gemma3:4b-it-qat"
vision_model_id = "gemma3:4b-it-qat"      # must be vision-capable
embedding_model_id = "bge-m3"

Leaving vision_model_id empty means "no local vision", which is a valid setup. A vision request then returns a message telling you what to set, rather than failing silently.

4. Route workloads to it

Turning local AI on does not move everything on-device. You choose per workload with a provider string of the form ollama:<model>:

chat_provider = "ollama:gemma3:4b-it-qat"
vision_provider = "ollama:gemma3:4b-it-qat"
embeddings_provider = "ollama:bge-m3"

The full set of workload fields is chat_provider, reasoning_provider, agentic_provider, coding_provider, vision_provider, memory_provider, embeddings_provider, heartbeat_provider, learning_provider, and subconscious_provider. Any field left unset, blank, or set to cloud stays on the default route.

Attaching images in chat needs one more flag

vision_provider routes the vision workload — image summaries and the OCR/description path. It does not by itself let you attach an image to a chat or agent turn.

A turn only rehydrates image attachments when the resolved chat model is known to accept them, and for a local model that knowledge comes from the per-model registry, not from vision_provider. Set the model's vision flag in Settings → AI (the custom-model dialog), which records it in model_registry:

[[model_registry]]
id = "gemma3:4b-it-qat"
provider = "ollama"
vision = true

Without that flag the images are stripped before dispatch and the model answers from the text alone — fluently, and with no indication that it never saw the picture.

See Local AI (optional) for the deeper runtime detail, LM Studio setup, and troubleshooting.

Route B: bring your own key

BYOK keeps the routing, memory, tools, and agent harness exactly as they are, and swaps out who serves the tokens. Your key, your account, your billing, no OpenHuman inference charges.

1. Add the provider

Add your key in the desktop app under the LLM settings, which stores it in the OS keyring rather than in plain config. OpenHuman ships presets for these slugs, so you do not need to supply an endpoint:

openai, anthropic, google, openrouter, orcarouter, groq, mistral, deepseek, together, fireworks, cerebras, xai, moonshot, gmi, huggingface, nvidia, zai, minimax, stepfun, kilocode, deepinfra, novita, venice, vercel-ai-gateway, sumopod, modelscope

Anything else that speaks the OpenAI-compatible API works too: register it with your own slug and endpoint, and it routes the same way.

2. Route workloads to it

Provider strings follow <slug>:<model>, using the same workload fields as the local route:

chat_provider = "anthropic:claude-sonnet-4"
reasoning_provider = "openai:gpt-5.1"
coding_provider = "deepseek:deepseek-coder"
vision_provider = "openai:gpt-5.1"

To make one provider the default for everything that is not pinned, set primary_cloud to its slug. Every workload left on cloud then resolves to that provider instead of the OpenHuman backend.

3. Check the model supports the workload

BYOK inherits your provider's capabilities, not OpenHuman's. Before pinning vision_provider, confirm the model you named accepts image input, and before pinning embeddings_provider, confirm the provider serves an embeddings endpoint. Not every chat provider does.

Mixing routes

The workload fields are independent, so a common privacy-conscious setup keeps recurring background work on-device and reserves a strong cloud model for the turns that need it:

# On-device: everything that runs constantly over personal data
embeddings_provider = "ollama:bge-m3"
memory_provider = "ollama:gemma3:1b-it-qat"
heartbeat_provider = "ollama:gemma3:1b-it-qat"
subconscious_provider = "ollama:gemma3:1b-it-qat"

# Your own key: the turns where quality matters
chat_provider = "anthropic:claude-sonnet-4"
reasoning_provider = "anthropic:claude-sonnet-4"

Troubleshooting

"no local vision model is configured" means local_ai.vision_model_id is empty. Set it to a vision-capable model and pull it, or point vision_provider at a cloud model instead.

"local vision model ... is not available" means the model is configured but not pulled. Run the ollama pull command in the message.

Vision answers look plausible but describe the wrong image. You are almost certainly on a chat-only model. Check vision_model_id against the capability table above. Current builds refuse this routing and fall back to a vision-capable model, so this points at an older build or a provider outside the local path.

A model you selected keeps reverting. Local chat model IDs are checked against a supported list, and an unrecognized ID falls back to the default. Use one of the IDs from the tier table.

Embeddings fail with a dimension error. The Memory Tree needs 1024-dimension vectors. Use bge-m3.

See also

• Local AI (optional). Runtime detail, LM Studio, and the opt-in flags.

• Automatic Model Routing. How hints pick a model per task.

• Privacy Mode. Enforcing local-only inference in the core.

• Privacy & Security. What moves on-device when you opt in.