Skip to content
RecurseChat

Introduction

Welcome to RecurseChat!

What is RecurseChat?

RecurseChat is a personal AI app for chatting with local AI offline and privately, as well as a powerful ChatGPT/Claude client. It offers a wide range of features to enhance your AI interaction experience:

  • Chat with local documents (PDF, markdown, and txt) completely offline
  • Interact with images using multimodal chat
  • Import and search your ChatGPT chat history
  • Perform fast advanced full-text search across thousands of chat messages
  • Fast navigation across chat history
  • Use multiple AI models in the same chat session
  • Organize chats with bookmarks and nested folders
  • Edit and branch messages freely, and switch between different message branches
  • Customize AI personalities and interface settings

With zero-config setup, RecurseChat supports various models including Meta Llama 3.1, Gemma 2, Mistral, LLaVA, and more. It also allows you to use your own GGUF files or add models from Hugging Face Hub.

Whether you’re looking for offline AI capabilities, document analysis, or a powerful ChatGPT/Claude client, RecurseChat provides a beautifully designed, feature-rich solution for all your AI chatting needs.

Philosophy

RecurseChat is built on a philosophy that prioritizes combination of intuitiveness and power, data ownership, and privacy. Our core principles include:

  1. Simple yet powerful: We strive to provide a user interface that feels familiar and easy to use for beginners, while offering advanced customization options for power users. If you are a beginner you can start chatting without having advanced knowledge of AI. If you are an advanced user you can customize the app to your liking.

  2. Data Ownership: We believe your chat history belongs to you. RecurseChat allows you to import existing ChatGPT conversations, search through them, and even continue those chats using local AI models. You’re never locked in – you can export your chat history at any time. We understand the importance of having access to AI assistance even without an internet connection. RecurseChat’s support for local models ensures you can work with AI privately and offline.

  3. Privacy and Security: Your privacy is of paramount importance. The app runs inside Mac App Sandbox. It’s a mandatory requirement to distribute in Mac App Store. (For apps distributed outside of Mac App Store, there’s no such requirements.) Apps running under Mac App Sandbox would only have access to user selected files and network access through entitlements, unauthorized access is blocked. You can read more about the App Sandbox in this blog post. We do not collect any usage or telemetry within the app. You can read more about our privacy policy here.

These principles guide our development, ensuring that RecurseChat remains a powerful, flexible, and user-centric AI companion that respects your privacy and puts you in control of your AI interactions.