AI is everywhere, but not all types of AI tools are accessible to end users.
Of course, you can easily try out ChatGPT and other AI tools through your web browser, but what about running AI apps locally on your computer while preserving your privacy?
You don't need to pay anyone, you can use your computer to safely use AI apps to generate text, generate images and videos, separate audio, and more.
Pinokio is an open source tool that lets you do just that with one click. Here we explain more about Pinokio and how to use it.
Pinokio: Making it easy to run AI apps
Usually, to deploy an AI app locally, you have to execute quite a few gibberish instructions, and the method also doesn’t guarantee the final result.
Pinokio comes to the rescue, describing itself as an “AI browser” – an app that uses one-click scripting to install and configure a variety of AI-powered apps and chatbots on your computer.
These are all stored in one folder and you can customize some of them as needed after installation.
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Pinokio requires a sufficient amount of system resources for all AI apps to run smoothly, and enough storage (at least 30-40GB of free storage) to install any kind of dependencies needed to run what we need.
If you have a decent system with at least 4-6 cores and a mid-range GPU with 6-12GB of VRAM, you should be able to run some stuff smoothly.
I have NVIDIA RTTX 10.0 3060 Ti graphics card with 8 GB VRAMAlso, tasks like converting text to video showed some minor performance issues.
Don't be discouraged if you don't try it, but if your system seems to stall and become unresponsive, you may need to try other tools that are less resource intensive. Some AI apps are more resource intensive. Honestly, that's the only drawback to trying to run AI apps locally.
Pinokio AI Browser Features
To give you an overview of Pinokio's features, we'll highlight some key points:
- It runs locally without sharing data to the cloud, making it a privacy-conscious option.
- This is a free and open source application.
- Cross-platform support available
- easy to use
How do I install AI apps using Pinokio?
beginning, You need to install the Pinokio AI browser on your Linux systemThe GitHub releases section provides multiple packages for you to install, including AppImage, .deb, and .rpm.
I tried it on Ubuntu 24.04 LTSI installed the deb package. I also tried the AppImage file, but the 1-click installation process did not work as expected.
Therefore, depending on your distribution, you might want to try the deb/rpm package instead.
If you need help, see the following tutorials:
Once installed, search for Pinokio and launch your browser. First, you will be asked to set the save path and the user experience theme.
Of course, I chose the dark theme (Sorry to all the dark mode fans out there seeing bright white screenshots 😉)
Once you click “Save”, you will be taken to the welcome page, Discover page.
Click to visit our Discover page and explore our wide range of options.
The available scripts are not presented in any particular order (most popular to least known) or best to worst, so you'll just be presented with a grid list to help you explore your options.
All you have to do is select the one you want to try and hit the download button as shown in the image below.
For the first time, it will install some dependencies necessary for any kind of project.
Once complete, you will be prompted to download the script for the AI tool you selected.
Clicking download now will start the script and begin progressing through the required installation/configuration – this may take some time for some AI apps, but may complete quickly if the required packages are already present.
Some AI apps require large downloads (6GB+), so make sure you have a sufficient internet connection and storage space. Once you start the download/installation, you will see the following:
Once the installation is complete, you will see a “Start” option on the sidebar, and when you launch it you can click on the “Web UI” option to access the app you want to use.
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Pinokio AI Browser has had no development activity for 9-10 months, and perhaps articles like this one will help more contributors revive the project and fix existing issues.
Some successful AI applications include:
- focus — Image generation app
- Face Fusion — Face Swap/Enhancement
- Audio September — Isolate what you describe from the audio clip
I also stumbled across some interesting chatbots like ChatGPT, but they didn't work for me. You might want to try some open source ChatGPT alternatives for this task.
13 Best Open Source ChatGPT Alternatives
Are you looking for an open source ChatGPT alternative? We have handpicked some of the best ones for you to take a look at.
And of the ones I was able to run, the Foocus image generator has quickly become my favorite and I plan to use it on social media for at least a while.
What do you think? I'm sure most of us agree! Cats, catnip, anime, and more! Shocking, right? 🤯
The image generator allows you to generate photorealistic images, anime style, etc. You can adjust the quality, add constraints, specify the number of images and the aspect ratio of the final image.
There was also a model that could generate comic pages using text prompts, which I haven't tried, but might be worth looking into.
Are you interested in a video generator? That's also there. But I'm not sure.Insufficient memory“An error occurred when running the VideoCrafter app. You may need 8GB or more of VRAM.
If you have one app installed, your storage folder will look like this:
Sure, it might not be the most convenient solution in every respect, but if you want to run AI apps locally without needing to know a myriad of technical details, the Pinokio Browser seems like a great option for apps that run within it.
You can also refer to the documentation for more information.
The year of AI is both exciting and scary
Finally, we are excited about having all the AI tools with generative models (or open source LLMs) at our disposal. And if we can do all this now, what can we do in the near future?
💬 We'll leave you with some food for thought, but let us know what you think in the comments below!
