Front Porch AI is a free, open-source desktop app for AI character chat that runs entirely on your machine. Living characters with real moods, a diary they actually keep, voices, worlds you build yourself — and not one word of it leaves your porch unless you say so.
Both are free and install side-by-side without touching each other's data. Pick your speed.
Latest release · v1.2.0
Built overnight from the Rawhide branch
Grab the newest Nightly rawhide.* pre-release · may have rough edges
.pkg installer. Front Porch AI is code-signed and notarized by Apple — it opens first try, no Gatekeeper warnings, no right-click rituals. How many apps in this space go through that hassle?
curl -fsSL https://apt.frontporchai.app/install.sh | bash && sudo apt install front-porch-ai
Fedora / Arch / AppImage →
A community character hub built right into the app — and open from any browser at hub.frontporchai.app. Browse featured cards, follow creators you love, vote and share, and download straight into your library. Live counters update in real time as the neighbourhood votes. Whole group casts travel too: members, lorebooks, and their living Realism state arrive intact, ready to play — and so do worlds, one file carrying a place's cover art, lore, climate and traits. Only the hub touches the network; everything else stays on your machine.
Your name opens a real profile: your picture, when you joined, your followers and lifetime stats, a bio and up to four links, with everything you've shared underneath as an art grid. Profile pictures need a confirmed email address — which also unlocks sharing your own cards.
One app, out of the box. No extensions to hunt down, no servers to configure by hand.
AI models run locally on your GPU. Offline use collects nothing and sends nothing. Remote APIs exist — but only if you turn them on.
Characters build bond and trust, hold grudges, carry moods between scenes, get hungry and tired, and grow new traits as your story unfolds.
The Journal keeps a real diary of the chat you're in — each memory stamped with the feeling behind it, strong ones staying vivid while quiet ones fade into the background. It all lives on your disk, and a character's own memories never leak from one chat into another.
Give a place its own climate: name the conditions, pick their emoji, set the temperature bands, choose the atmosphere and the gravity. Characters feel the heat, the cold and the thin air — and say so.
Portraits swap in real time with the character's emotions. Works with standard SillyTavern expression packs.
Natural offline text-to-speech in dozens of voices, push-to-talk dictation, and a hands-free voice call mode. Bring your own Piper voice files and they sit alongside the built-in ones.
Put a whole cast in one room. They talk to you and each other — each with their own moods, needs, and voice. And the cast is never locked: type /join to walk someone in from your library mid-scene, /exit to walk them back out, all in the same conversation.
Turn your chats into an illustrated novel with a page-flip reader and audiobook narration.
Connect A1111, Forge, SDNext, ComfyUI, or Draw Things and get scene art and avatars without leaving the chat.
Nest folders however you like, then drag characters and whole group casts into them — one at a time, or a dozen at once from the multi-select toolbar.
The app snapshots its database every half hour on its own and keeps a rolling history, so a bad run of edits is a couple of clicks from rolled back. It's the database that gets saved — chats, characters and their settings — not the image files sitting on your disk. All local: there is no cloud sync to opt into.
The built-in web app brings your library to any browser on your network — pick up the same chat from the couch.
“Nothing. Unless you say so.”
No account. No telemetry for local use. No subscription, ever. The optional Stoop hub and remote APIs are the only online features, and both are strictly opt-in. Read the plain-English privacy policy →
