Silo Vault ingests your folders, documents, and notes into private named vaults, then answers questions with page-level citations from local Gemma models on Apple Silicon — on-device hybrid RAG fusing keyword and vector search. The differentiator: each vault is also a local MCP server, so Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor can query your private corpus over stdio with no open port. Vision OCR, a Legal/Contracts mode, and an optional, opt-in workspace timeline round it out. No upload, no account, no cloud.
Cloud knowledge bases and RAG-as-a-service platforms run your documents through their servers, charge per seat, and ask you to trust them with your private corpus. Silo Vault takes the opposite path: ingestion, search, cited answers, and the MCP server that feeds your AI tools all run on the Mac you already own. Your case files never become someone else's training data, and your archive never lives on someone else's server.
Ingestion, hybrid search, cited chat, OCR, the MCP server, and the optional workspace timeline all run on your Mac through a bundled local runtime on your Apple Silicon GPU. The Gemma chat and embedding model weights download once from public open-weights mirrors after onboarding, then Silo Vault works offline for the lifetime of the app — in a SCIF exactly the way it works at your desk.
Each vault becomes a local Model Context Protocol server that speaks stdio only — no open port, no remote connection. Point Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor at it and your private documents answer questions in-line, grounded in your own files, without a single byte leaving the machine. The retrieval layer your agent needs, run on hardware you already own.
Questions are answered locally by Gemma models through Apple MLX, grounded in your own documents — and every answer cites its sources with page numbers, so you can check the work. The research assistant a cloud service would charge you a subscription for, and feed your files into, is computed locally and kept there.
Point Silo Vault at the folders, documents, and notes you choose and group them into named vaults — one per case, project, or subject. PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, CSV, Markdown, and plain text parse locally, and scanned PDFs and images are read with on-device Apple Vision OCR. Nothing is uploaded; nothing needs a connection.
Hybrid RAG — SQLite FTS5 keywords fused with local vector embeddings via Reciprocal Rank Fusion — pulls the right passages, and a local Gemma model on Apple MLX writes the answer, grounded in your documents. Every answer cites its sources with page numbers, so you can verify it against the file — entirely on-device.
Expose any vault as a local Model Context Protocol server and point Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor at it. It speaks stdio only — no open port, no remote connection — so your AI tools answer questions grounded in your own indexed documents, on-device. Or turn retrieved context into a Summary, FAQ, Timeline, or Brief, and put a vault in Legal/Contracts mode for risk flags and clause redlines.
New in this release, and entirely optional: ambient capture builds a private, searchable timeline of what you worked on. It is off by default and only ever runs after you explicitly turn it on. Everything — periodic screen OCR and optional audio transcription — happens on-device and is stored on-device only. A menu-bar recording indicator shows whenever capture is active, and you choose which apps and secure-field contexts are excluded.
Capture is off until you enable it, never leaves your Mac, and a menu-bar recording indicator stays visible the entire time it runs — so it is always obvious when recall is active.
Name apps to skip and secure-field contexts (password fields and the like) are excluded automatically. Set a retention window and old timeline entries expire on their own; clear the whole history with one action.
On-device screen OCR and optional transcription feed the same hybrid search and cited-answer engine as your vaults — ask what you were working on last Tuesday and get a grounded, on-device answer.
Group folders, documents, and notes into separate collections — one vault per case, project, or subject — and search each independently. A vault is a boundary: queries against one never bleed into another.
Expose any vault to Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor through a local Model Context Protocol server. It speaks stdio only — no open network port, no remote connections — so your AI tools query your private corpus on-device.
Chat with local Gemma models through Apple MLX, grounded in your documents. Every answer cites its sources with page numbers — no hand-waving, no hallucinated references, no cloud round-trip.
SQLite FTS5 keyword search fused with local vector embeddings via Reciprocal Rank Fusion, so exact terms and fuzzy meaning both land — and the right passage surfaces either way.
PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, CSV, Markdown, and plain text parse locally. Scanned PDFs and images are read with on-device Apple Vision OCR via the bundled silovault-ocr CLI — no cloud OCR.
A per-vault preset for reviewing agreements on-device: risk flags, clause extraction, a risk-scoring dashboard, negotiation-playbook comparison, clause-level compare/redline, and one-click PDF export. Informational review only — not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created.
Optional, off-by-default ambient capture: periodic on-device screen OCR and optional audio transcription build a private, searchable timeline of your work. Stored on-device only, shown by a menu-bar recording indicator, with app and secure-field exclusions.
Turn retrieved context into a Summary, FAQ, Timeline, or executive Brief — structured documents generated on-device from your own sources, ready to hand off.
Hosted knowledge bases and RAG platforms rent you the workflow by the seat and run your documents through their servers. Silo Vault is a single purchase, on your Mac, with unlimited local ingestion, search, cited chat, OCR, transforms, the MCP server, and optional workspace recall — because it all runs on hardware you already own. Buy once, keep the archive.
Coming to the Mac App Store ⌘Silo Vault is in pre-release for the Mac App Store. Join the waitlist and we'll send a single email when it goes live — no marketing list, no newsletter, no follow-up campaigns.
