Local-first knowledge engine · Windows
Answers from your documents. Nothing leaves your machine by default.
Motekai Retriever reads your notes and files, finds the passages that matter, and answers in plain language, with a citation on every claim. No account, no subscription, and a local model out of the box. Connect your own cloud key if you prefer, and your documents are still indexed and searched on your PC.
Windows 10/11 · signed installer · full-featured trial, no card needed
Most assistants answer from memory, and sometimes they guess. Motekai opens your filing cabinet first — it only answers from what it can actually find in your documents.
Updates
What's new
- v0.3.20
One companion, three states
An orb in the corner of your screen. Ask, get a cited answer, carry on.
- v0.3.20
Four things worth knowing
What it reads, what it does when it cannot find something, and what gets indexed.
Follow a question
From your words to a cited answer
Watch one question travel through the system, all of it on your own machine.
You ask in plain language
No keywords, no syntax. Ask the way you'd ask a colleague.
“What's our refund window?”
Your question becomes a fingerprint
It's turned into numbers that capture meaning, so a match can be found even when the words are different.
Under the hoodAn embedding model maps the question into a vector.
Motekai searches your knowledge
That fingerprint is compared against every passage in your documents, and the closest matches are pulled out.
Under the hoodNearest-neighbour search over a vector index, then a reranker re-sorts the top hits for precision.
The best passages become context
Only the most relevant pages are handed to the language model to read, nothing else.
Under the hoodThe retrieved passages are placed in the prompt as the model's only source.
It writes a grounded, cited answer
The model answers using only those passages, and marks each claim with a citation you can open and check.
Under the hoodEach claim is scored against the passage behind it, and the score travels with the answer. When retrieval finds nothing to work from, the answer is a refusal rather than a guess.
Why you can trust the answer
Grounded by construction.
Grounded, not invented
Answers come from your documents and nothing else. Every claim is checked against the passages behind it and scored, and when the search turns up nothing, Motekai says so rather than guess.
Cited to your sources
Every claim carries a citation back to the exact document it came from, so you can verify the answer in one click.
Runs on your machine
Your documents stay local. Out of the box the models run on your own PC, so nothing is uploaded to a third party. Connect your own cloud key and only your question and the passages it matched are sent.
Before you download
System requirements
- Operating system
- Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. The installer is code-signed. macOS and Linux aren't supported yet.
- Memory
- 16 GB RAM recommended. The local model is a 7B and that is what every install runs — there is no automatic switch to a smaller one. It works on 8 GB, answers just come back slower.
- Disk space
- The installer is about 270 MB to download. On first run the app downloads its local AI engine, the models and the reranker weights (several GB more, each checksum-verified). Plan for roughly 8 GB free in total.
- Internet
- Needed once, for the first-run model download, and for optional update checks. After that the default setup works fully offline. A cloud model, if you pick one at setup, needs a connection to answer.
- GPU
- Not required. Answers come from a local model running on your CPU; a supported GPU makes them faster.
Honest note: local AI is compute-hungry. On older hardware, answers take longer, the free trial is the right way to find out how it feels on your machine before paying anything.
Questions
Frequently asked
Ask your own documents.
Free for 14 days, full-featured, offline after the first run. Using it past that? Talk to us about a licence.