how local AI works
Every recording is processed on your machine — here's what the models do, where they come from, and how yapyap reuses ones you already have.
yapyap never sends a recording anywhere. Everything that turns audio into insight — transcription, speaker recognition, understanding, lenses — runs on your own machine.
the stages
Each stage of processing has its own model, picked during onboarding and changeable any time under settings:
| stage | what it does |
|---|---|
| listen | turns speech into text |
| recognise | works out who spoke when |
| understand | pulls out names and sentiment, and makes everything searchable |
| insight | the AI that writes titles and summaries and runs your lenses |
The first three stages use small, specialised models that yapyap downloads and manages for you. The insight stage uses a full AI language model — and that one is a little special, because there are two engines that can run it.
the AI language model
The language models in the picker are a curated set of well-known open models, in a few sizes. They're all free to use commercially and all multilingual, so whichever you pick, yapyap can work in your language.
You don't have to think about which engine runs your pick:
- your own Ollama, if you already use it and it's running;
- yapyap's built-in engine, whenever Ollama isn't.
yapyap chooses automatically, and you get the same results either way. You never have to install Ollama — but if you already have it, yapyap uses it, and can run any model from your Ollama library, not just the ones in the picker.
See language model engines for how the choice is made, and using your own models for reusing models you already have (no double downloads).
nothing downloads twice
Before yapyap downloads any language model, it checks everywhere the same files might already be:
- models yapyap downloaded earlier,
- your Ollama library (even while Ollama isn't running),
- any extra model folders you've added.
If a copy is already there, it's used as-is — a 5 GB model you already have is never downloaded again.