Local AI

What This Is#

Most “AI features” in apps these days mean “your files get sent to a server in California, processed by a model owned by a startup, and the results come back.” Useful, but not great if you care about where your documents end up.

Seiz takes the opposite approach. Every AI feature in Seiz runs on your Mac through Ollama, a free open-source local model engine you install separately. There's no cloud, no account, no API key, no analytics. The models look at your files, do their thing, and the results never leave the device. (Apple Intelligence support via the Foundation Models framework is planned for macOS 26 once Apple ships the public SDK.)

AI is off by default. You opt in feature by feature in Settings. Everything below is included in the base $29 license — no premium tier.

Smart Rename#

Select a file, open the Inspector panel on the right, and click AI Smart Rename. Seiz reads the file's contents (text inside a PDF, the subject of a photo, code in a script) and suggests a descriptive name. You can edit the suggestion before accepting it, or dismiss it entirely.

Each suggestion comes with a small confidence badge: green for high confidence, orange for medium, red for low. Don't accept the red ones blindly — they're Seiz admitting it's guessing.

Semantic Search#

Press ⌘K to open the Command Bar and type what you're looking for in plain English: “budget spreadsheets”, “photos from Iceland”, “the contract with Acme”. Seiz finds files by meaning, not just by file name — so a PDF called final_v3_signed.pdf still shows up when you search for “contract” if it actually contains contract text.

Semantic search needs an index, which Seiz builds in the background the first time you enable it. The index covers up to 50,000 files (more than enough for most home folders) and lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Seiz/. It typically uses 10–50 MB of disk space — small, because it stores summaries and fingerprints, not your actual files.

Automatic Summaries#

When you select a file in Seiz, the Inspector panel can show an AI-generated summary of what's inside — a few sentences for a long PDF, a description of what's in a photo, an outline of a piece of code. Useful for quickly remembering what a file is without opening it.

Summaries are computed on demand and cached as hidden file metadata, so the same file doesn't get re-summarized every time you click on it. You can turn this off entirely in Settings if you prefer.

Image OCR#

Screenshots, photos of receipts, scanned documents — anything with text in it can be searched as if the text were native. Seiz extracts the text in the background using macOS's built-in OCR engine and feeds it into the same semantic search index. So you can search for the word in a screenshot and find the screenshot.

English and Vietnamese are both supported. OCR runs on the file once and the result is cached — there's no ongoing CPU cost.

Smart File Grouping#

When a folder has 50 or more files, Seiz can automatically group them into seven categories — Screenshots, Images, Documents, Code, Media, Archives, and Installers. The groups appear as collapsible sections in the file list, so you can collapse the noise and focus on the type you care about. This is purely a viewing convenience: nothing on disk changes, no files get moved. (Smart Grouping uses local rule-based classification — no model needed.)

What You'll See When AI Is Working#

AI work is always visible and never blocks you. While indexing happens, you'll see a small progress indicator in the status bar at the bottom of the window. The Inspector shows “Analyzing file content…” or “Summarizing…” spinners when it's working on the selected file. None of this prevents you from doing anything else — you can keep browsing, copying, renaming files while the AI does its thing in the background.

Privacy#

Worth saying twice because it's the whole point: nothing leaves your Mac. There is no cloud API, no telemetry, no file upload, not even an anonymous “feature usage count.” If you turn off your Wi-Fi, every AI feature still works exactly the same. GPS data in your photos is explicitly stripped before any AI processing — Seiz treats your location history as private by default.

Next Steps#

• Command Bar — where semantic search lives.
• SmartFolder — find duplicates, big files, and uninstall apps.
• BatchRename — rule-based renaming if you want predictable, deterministic results instead of AI suggestions.