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Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

apfel.franzai.com

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Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#101

Post by divan »

windsurfer wrote: post #95
divan wrote: post #92

What's the easiest way to use it with on-device voice model for voice chat?

https://github.com/Arthur-Ficial/apfel-gui uses on-device speech-to-text and text-to-speech

Thanks, tried it, but it's crashes on clicking the microphone icon. Default `make install` for some reason tries to install it to /usr, I changed that and after torturing more mature coding LLMs for 20 minutes, made it running with mic/sound.

The mic button requires clicking to transcribe and start listening again, and default voice is low-quality (I assume it can be configured).

In general I'm looking for a way to try the on-device hands-free voice mode.

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#103

Post by reaperducer »

franze wrote: post #6
p1anecrazy wrote: post #5

Really like demo cli tools description. Are they limited by the context window as well? What’s your experience with log file sizes?

the 2 hard limits of Appel Intelligence Foundation Model and therefor apfel is the 4k token context window and the super hard guardrails (the model prefers to tell you nothing before it tells you something wrong ie ask it to describe a color) parsing logfiles line by line, sure parsing a whole logfile, well it must be tiny, logfile hardly ever are

the model prefers to tell you nothing before it tells you something wrong

If all LLMs did this, people would trust them more.

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#104

Post by hombre_fatal »

convexly wrote: post #29

I like the approach of running everything locally. I'm strongly of the opinion that the privacy angle for local models is going to keep getting stronger and more relevant. The amount of articles that come out about accidents happening because of people handing too much context to cloud models the more self reinforcing this will become.

Another angle is when you're passing untrusted content to the AI service, e.g. anything from using it to crawl websites to spam-detection on new forum user posts.

You can trigger the the service's ToS violation or worse, get tipped off to law enforcement for something you didn't even write.

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#106

Post by g-mork »

naravara wrote: post #59
gherkinnn wrote: post #40

Now this is a development I like. With the Claude bug, or so it is known, burning through tokens at record speed, I gave alternative models a try and they're mostly ... interchangeable. I don't know how easy switching and low brand loyalty and fast markets will play out. I hope that local LLMs will become very viable very soon.

Yeah I don’t think the models are meaningfully differentiated outside of very specific edge cases. I suspect this was the thinking behind OpenAI and Facebook and all trying to lean hard into presenting their chatbots as friends and romantic partners. If they can’t maintain a technical moat they can try to cultivate an emotional one.

Saw a comment here yesterday referencing the Attention Is All You Need paper title in a tongue in cheek way. Kinda fun to imagine the friend/romance angle is just a bunch of socially awkward folk at OpenAI misinterpreting the original paper

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#108

Post by ronb1964 »

I'm a Linux user who wanted exactly this but for Linux — so I ended up building it myself. It's called TalkType, it runs Whisper locally for offline speech-to-text. The privacy angle was a big reason I went local from the start — I didn't want my voice being sent to anyone's server. Nice to see the same idea getting traction on Mac.

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#110

Post by knocte »

LatencyKills wrote: post #11
swiftcoder wrote: post #9

Anyone tried using this as a sub-agent for a more capable model like Claude/Codex?

The combined (input/output) context window length is 4K. Claude would blow through that even when trying to read and summarize a small file.

With a small/minimalistic harness like Pi maybe it works well?
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