A companion that answers with no network route at all.
B.A.I.S. Essentials is a local personal AI companion — voice, memory, a working command set — that installs and runs entirely on the device it ships on. Not "privacy-first" as a slogan. Verified with the network cable pulled out.
A bounded product, by design
Small enough that a partner's own engineers can read it in an afternoon before agreeing to support it.
| Personas | Three — Nova, Atlas, Wren — defined entirely in JSON, brandable |
| Conversation | A local model over HTTP; nothing leaves the machine |
| Memory | Per-persona, on-device; one persona cannot read another's |
| Commands | 33, across eight categories, every one working with no model loaded |
| Shells | Terminal, browser, and an optional desktop window (PySide6, LGPL) |
| Dependencies | Python 3.10+. Nothing else required to run it |
| Licensing | Required components are the standard library only — no model ships, no GPL exposure |
Every line below was run, not written from intent.
Runs off the target, not this lab
Installed and exercised on separate physical hardware, offline, in a network namespace with no route to anything.
Boots from a stick
Cut to a bootable image, loop-mounted read-only and installed from — the way a desktop actually meets removable media.
An allowlist, not a promise
Nothing ships unless a manifest names it, and the release is deleted rather than written if a reserved term is found in it.
Sentai proved older adults will talk to a companion. Theirs runs on Alexa. Yours does not have to.
Sentai's own privacy language — "it isn't a surveillance system" — is the sentence a cloud-speaker product is limited to. A device with no network route is not making that claim; it is describing what it is.How this actually goes
Deliberately short, and no source or install media changes hands before an agreement is signed.
- A demonstrationLive or a recording — the session above, in full, or run against your own hardware.
- A mutual NDAStandard, both ways.
- A pilot scopeWhat you'd ship, on what device, over what period.
- TermsNegotiable, set against the pilot — nothing quoted before one exists.
Talk to the person who built it
Fifteen minutes is enough to know if this is worth a second one.