For years, “private AI” has meant a company promising it isn’t looking. You clicked I agree, and then you hoped they meant it.
You know the feeling even if you’ve never said it out loud. You paste something into a chat box — a client’s numbers, a rough idea you’re not ready to share, a question that’s a little too personal — and a small part of you wonders where it actually goes. Onto whose servers. Into whose next training run. You rent the tool, you rent the intelligence, and somewhere in the fine print you rent away the one thing you can’t get back: the privacy of your own thinking.
That quiet unease is the before. Here’s the after: you stop wondering, because you can look.
The news
Today the helloim.ai desktop app is free and public. The full code that runs on your machine is on GitHub for anyone to read, at github.com/mdalton24/helloim-app.
A word on what “free and public” means, because it’s precise. It’s source-available under an MIT license with the Commons Clause: free to use, free to read, free to modify — not for resale. That last clause is the one boundary. It isn’t OSI open source, and I’m not going to call it that. It’s the code, in the open, yours to run and to check.
What it is
helloim.ai is a personal AI assistant that talks and listens, and lives on your machine instead of ours. You pick who you talk to — Giles is one of the assistants you can choose, one face and voice among several — so it sounds and feels like something you’d actually want on your desk.
helloim.ai is bring-your-own-brain. You plug in your own key — Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, or a local model — so the intelligence is yours, the bill is yours, and the conversation runs between you and your provider with nobody in the middle. We never see your key. We never see your words. And now you don’t have to take that on faith, because the code that handles both is right there to read.
The app is free. Every face and every voice is free, and stays free. You’re not renting it from us; you’re running it yourself.
One honest note before you get excited: helloim.ai is Windows only right now. That’s where it runs today, and it’s a release candidate — solid enough to live with, still being sharpened. I won’t pretend it’s more finished, or more cross-platform, than it is.
Why public code matters here specifically
A privacy promise you can’t inspect isn’t a promise. It’s a marketing line.
Now you can. You can see, line by line, that your conversations stay on your computer and your key stays yours. Not because we said so — because it’s there to read. The whole point of a tool that guards what’s yours is that you shouldn’t have to guard it from the tool. Publishing the code is the only version of “private” that survives being checked. So we published it. If we ever quietly changed what runs on your machine, you’d be able to tell.
Support and getting started
Shipping the code is half of it. Standing behind it is the other half.
To use helloim.ai, download it at helloim.ai — that’s where the app itself lives (Windows for now). To read, run, or take apart the source, the repository is at github.com/mdalton24/helloim-app. Two doors: one to get it, one to check it.
And when you need a hand — setting it up, plugging in your key, or working out whether it’s for you — help lives at helloim.ai. That’s where the guidance is, and where you’ll find the community Discord to reach us directly and shape what comes next. You’re not on your own with a zip file and good luck. The code is open and someone’s there when you need one.
The close
If you’re tired of hoping your AI respects your privacy, and you’d rather just know — come and look.
You don’t have to trust us. You can check.
The repository is at github.com/mdalton24/helloim-app. Support is at helloim.ai.