As AI tools continue to penetrate broader demographics, more people are interested in offline AI solutions that don’t send data/prompts to third-party servers!
However, most people don’t realize they can run local AI models on their Android smartphone — and these models can pull a lot of weight.
More importantly, many of the tasks you can get done using local AI are also better done offline, considering aspects like privacy and affordability. Here are five such purposes you can use local AI on Android for.
Chatting and rewriting
Turns out privacy and speed aren’t a trade-off
Getting quick answers to everyday questions and rewriting text are two tasks most people use AI chatbots for. These tasks also happen to be the ones you can easily do using a local AI app on Android. The biggest benefit? You don’t have to worry about privacy concerns while working with sensitive information because the content doesn’t leave your device! Depending on the model you choose, the process can be pretty quick, too.
Now, you can use a few ways to achieve this goal. The easiest (and most efficient) option is to set up a suitable AI model via the Google AI Edge Gallery and load it whenever you need to rewrite a piece of text or want to chat. Within AI Edge Gallery, you can also choose between AI Chat (for multi-turn conversations) and Prompt Lab (for single-instance rewriting). If you want advanced research for writing, I’d also recommend using the Wikipedia skill built into the Agent mode.
Sure, you can’t expect the speed you are used to with ChatGPT or Gemini. Yet, when dealing with sensitive content you don’t want used for training, the patience is worth the privacy benefits.
- OS
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Android, iOS
- Price model
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Free
- App Type
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Local AI
Understanding images
Image AI doesn’t need a server either
Earlier, AI models you could run locally were limited to text-based tasks, but that has changed with Google’s latest Gemma models. Considering that Gemini and Google Lens reach out to the cloud whenever you ask an image-related question, you get some benefits while using an offline system to identify objects in an image or describe something. Fortunately, you can use the AI Edge Gallery app to get this done.
You can choose from four Gemma models to run the Ask Image section of the Edge Gallery app, and they can offer incredible performance depending on your device. I tested this on my smartphone with 16 GB of RAM, and the process was pretty smooth. You can either capture a new image or upload an existing one. The Gemma model does a decent job, but it is not without occasional hallucinations.
Nevertheless, when you need a walking description of an image that you do not want cloud providers to access, the Ask Image function on Edge Gallery does that job efficiently.
Transcribing text
Voice typing that doesn’t wait on Wi-Fi
Voice-to-text transcription is an area where you can find countless apps that charge a fortune every month, but most of these tools rely on cloud processing instead of on-device processing. This means the words you speak have to be sent to a third-party server. Thanks to the increasing performance of local AI models, you can easily run these tasks on your device, which means you don’t need Wi-Fi to write a long piece of text using voice.
The latest version of AI Edge Gallery lets you choose among four models for Audio Scribe, which can transcribe content you record or upload. The limitation here is that you can have clips only up to 30 seconds. My recommendation, however, is FUTO Keyboard, an open-source Android keyboard with many features, voice typing chief among them. It uses on-device models to transcribe what you speak and does a great job of cleaning up!
Integrated on-device autocorrect and prediction are other features I love so much about FUTO Keyboard! It also offers a smooth way to insert text into corresponding fields without the app-switching slow dance.
- OS
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Android
- Developer(s)
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FUTO
- Price model
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Free
Chatting with PDFs
A document that never leaves your phone
Most of us deal with PDF documents that we wouldn’t otherwise upload to AI tools, but do it anyway because it’s very convenient. These privacy concerns are also why local AI tools make more sense to handle this task. Fortunately, you can find a couple of ways to chat with PDFs without those documents leaving your smartphone. I’ve recently been using an app called Anvit for local RAG functions, and it uses a local Gemma model!
Considering Anvit is an app by an independent developer, it does an incredible job of letting you chat with PDF documents! The process takes a few minutes, including time to download the main AI model and the supplementary one for RAG. Once this task is complete, Anvit asks you to upload the PDF that will be prepared for RAG. After this, you can easily chat with the said PDF document.
As you’d imagine, it makes more sense to use an app like Anvit rather than upload your corporate documents or something you’re working on to the cloud.
Running a full LLM
The benchmark numbers did the convincing
In the end, you might also want to have a general large language model running on your device because it just makes sense. Fortunately, you can use AI Edge Gallery to get this done as long as you have the right models. This section of this AI app also lets you have a couple of non-Gemma models, such as Qwen 2.5 Instruct and DeepSeek R1 Distill. This way, even if you don’t have a particularly high-end device, you can still run a full LLM.
As a multimodal LLM, the AI chat function does a great job, with each chat supporting up to 10 images and 1 30-second audio clip. You can chat the same way you would with ChatGPT or Claude, but speeds will depend on the device and available resources. I should also appreciate the control you have in the AI Edge Gallery app, because you can adjust the number of tokens, accelerator options, and even the system prompt.
Keep in mind that some models will increase your CPU and RAM usage, depending on how you have configured them. That said, you can live with it, since you can run these models without an internet connection.
Where local AI still struggles
As you can understand, local AI solutions are not a one-size-fits-all solution for all devices! It means you will have to consider factors like your device’s RAM, storage space, and processing speed before choosing a model that suits you well. Some of the models I tested in this process weighed around 5GB, and that’s not a small amount. Nevertheless, it’s also a question of what you value the most — system resources or privacy. As you see, all these tools are free — so are the models — and that makes a difference for most people!