Help & support.

Not unless you turn on your own cloud key or connect an AI tool that uses a cloud service. Indexing, search, cited answers, the MCP server and the optional Timeline run on your Mac, and your vaults live inside the app's sandbox container. There is no account, no telemetry and no analytics, and Silo Systems never receives your content. The only requests Silo Vault can make are ones you start: the consent-gated model download, the optional model-catalog refresh, and requests through your own cloud key if you switch it on. An AI tool you connect through Connect AI receives the passages it asks for and handles them under its own terms.

It is off by default and asks for your consent before it turns on. While it is on, each Ask question sends the question, up to 20 earlier messages of that conversation and the excerpts retrieved for it straight from your Mac to the provider you chose under your own account. Your key stays in the macOS Keychain and never reaches Silo Systems, and a cloud badge shows whenever a cloud provider is active. Through version 1.12.2 the key also serves summaries and other transforms, contract review, document comparison and the Source Inspector, which send the document excerpts they read, and a question asked with Recall on and RAG off sends up to three matching Timeline moments. Later versions use the key for Ask answers only and never send Timeline moments.

Silo Vault needs a local chat model and an embedding model before it can index or answer. With your consent it downloads about 3.8 to 5.4 GB, depending on your Mac's memory, from revision-pinned public repositories, and shows the exact size and license first. After that it works offline. Larger models are optional picks in Settings and are never required.

Open the sample vault from the first-run screen, the empty workspace or the command palette. It holds three example documents (a PDF memo, a spreadsheet budget and Markdown meeting notes), their knowledge graph and a prepared cited answer you can trace to the page and cells. Ask stays off in the sample until the models finish; then it becomes an ordinary vault you can question. Remove it any time from the vault bar.

Open Connect AI in the sidebar. Copy the Any MCP client block into your tool's MCP settings; per-tool blocks are there too. The tool then starts Silo Vault itself over stdio: no network port is opened, no remote connection is made, and there is no key to manage. Connected tools can list your vaults and sources, search a vault or its knowledge graph, read a cited passage, follow backlinks, search your Timeline when it is on, and run a summary. What the server returns goes to that tool, which may send it to its own cloud service under its own terms.

It is off by default and makes no request until you turn it on. Once enabled, Silo Vault fetches, at most once a day, one signed model-catalog file from ohmslaw.net, a site operated by Silo Systems and hosted on Vercel, and verifies the signature on your Mac. It is a one-way download of metadata: no document, vault name, search query, chat message, or account identifier is sent. The request exposes only what any HTTPS request exposes, your IP address and a user-agent string. Turning it off stops the checks, and if the catalog is missing, expired, or fails verification, Silo Vault keeps the signed model list already inside the app.

It means the model has not been tested on Silo Systems hardware, and its memory figure is an estimate rather than a measurement. An experimental model is never picked for you and is never a default, and installing one takes an explicit extra confirmation on top of the normal download consent. It may need more memory than estimated, or run poorly, on your Mac.

The Timeline is off by default and never runs until you turn it on. When enabled, it builds a searchable record of your own work from periodic on-device screen text recognition and optional audio transcription. A menu-bar indicator shows while capture is active, you can exclude specific apps, frames are skipped while a password field has focus, and old entries expire after the retention window you set. Turn off & securely purge deletes the history and verifies that nothing remains. Silo Vault never uploads captured moments on its own. An AI tool you connect can read matching moments while the Timeline is on, and through version 1.12.2 a question asked with your own cloud key on, Recall on and RAG off sends up to three matching moments to that provider; later versions never send Timeline moments to a cloud provider.

PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, CSV, Markdown, and plain text parse on your Mac. PDFs are read from their text layer, so a scanned PDF without one adds no searchable text yet. Everything is indexed into the vault you choose.

Silo Vault fuses keyword search with local vector search by Reciprocal Rank Fusion, so exact terms and fuzzy meaning both surface the right passage. By default a local model then writes the answer from those passages (the provider you chose writes it while your own cloud key is on), and every citation opens the stored passage it came from: a document page or a worksheet cell range. Grounded mode measures how much of an answer its sources cover and holds back a draft they do not support.

It is a vault preset for reviewing agreements, on your Mac by default: risk flags, clause extraction, a risk dashboard, comparison against your negotiation playbook, clause-level redlines between two versions, and PDF export of a finished result. It is informational document review only, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created.

They live in Silo Vault. Create a vault with the Legal / Contracts preset for risk flags, playbook comparison, clause-level compare and cited answers about your agreements. OhmsCounsel now proofreads a draft itself: defined terms, cross-references, numbering, exhibits and party names.

Yes. Export a vault as an encrypted, versioned .silovault archive under a passphrase you choose (AES-256-GCM). Import verifies integrity and previews naming conflicts first, then creates a separate copy instead of overwriting an existing vault.