Why Nixi runs on your PC

When you talk to a voice assistant, you hand it a stream of everything you say: names, work, half-finished thoughts, the thing you muttered to yourself before you remembered it was listening. Most assistants send that to a server. We decided early that Nixi would not.

What stays on your PC

Speech recognition runs on your PC. So does the language model that understands what you asked and writes text for you. Your history, your settings and the logs Nixi keeps for itself live on your PC too. Nixi does not need an account, and it does not upload your audio, your words or your screen.

The only time Nixi uses the network is when you ask it to reach the web: opening a website, running a search, drafting an email in your browser. Those use your normal connection, the same as if you had typed the address yourself.

Why we did it the hard way

Trust. A tool you speak to all day should earn that access. "We don't collect it" is a stronger promise than "we collect it carefully", and it is one you can check: turn off your internet connection and dictate a paragraph.

Cost. Cloud speech costs money for every minute, and that cost lands on someone. Because the work happens on your computer, Nixi's dictation can be free, with no monthly fee and no per-word fee. Free features stay free.

Speed. Nothing has to travel anywhere. The pill answers as soon as the speech is understood, not after a round trip.

What it costs

We will not pretend this is free of trade-offs. The models live inside the installer, so the download is large, about 1.3 GB. A very old or very small PC will find it slower than a server farm would. The assistant that comes built in is chosen to run on an ordinary laptop, so Nixi is built around doing everyday things well rather than answering every question under the sun. If your PC is stronger, Settings can download a larger one for you.

We think that is the right trade for something that listens to you all day.

What comes later

Some people will want more power than their PC can give, and are happy to use their own account with a cloud service for it. We plan to let you bring your own key for that, as an explicit choice you make, kept separate from the free app. The free app stays local.

If you have a question about what Nixi does with your data, you can read the privacy notice, or ask in our Discord.