Personal productivityOriginal Reddit post
[OS] Sero Free macOS app for searching and understanding your documents with local AI
Problem Many of the documents that need the most AI assistance are also the ones people don't want leaving their device. Sero is a local AI workspace for macOS that helps you search, understand, and retrieve information from PDFs, notes, contracts, documentation, and personal knowledge bases using local models. Comparison NotebookLM and other cloud-based experience, while Sero keeps files on your Mac. Pricing Free and Open Source Website: https://sero.tanayarya.com GitHub: https://github.com/tanayarya/Sero-App LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanayarya/ Note: The app is currently not notarized by Apple.
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Very Nice...Thanks
Really appreciate you taking the time to check it out.
Looks like individual PDFs, and not directories of them?
Right now it’s focused on individual documents PDF, TXT, MD, but folder-level indexing and knowledge-base style workflows I’m actively exploring.
very cool !
Thanks!
Any limitations for PDF size that can be read?
There's no strict PDF size limit. In practice, performance depends more on the amount of text being embed and the local hardware you're running on. Large reports and books generally work fine, although indexing took couple of 10-15 sec I have tried with 300-400 pages books.
Looks interesting, which models would you recommend to use with it generally?
For 8gb Ram I would recommend Qwen 2.5 3b or Qwen coder models they are really good and for 16+ gb Ram Qwen 3 8B or above
Oh that's nice, can it also handle iages and files renaming ? I have a big library of screenshots from my dev work and it would be genuinely helpful to batch rename them based on image data
It’s not for batch renaming or anything like that it’s more of a doc chat app, where you can converse with your documents using local AI.
How are you integrating local AI? May I ask you some questions?
Sero uses Ollama for local models and documents are processed and indexed locally. The entire workflow runs on the user’s device or you can run Ollama on another device within the same network and use that machine's capabilities. Feel free to ask anything you’re curious about.
Local-only document AI is the right call for contracts and personal notes, glad to see an open source one. Two questions before I try it: does it run models through Ollama or bundle its own, and when it answers does it cite back to the specific page or section in the source doc? Citations are what make or break these for me, otherwise I never fully trust the summary.
Sero currently uses Ollama, so you’re free to choose the local model that works best for your machine. As for citations, yes, responses include page references. As answer quality depends on both the model and the amount of content being retrieved. Very large PDFs with hundreds of pages can be more challenging because the relevant context has to be identified and ranked correctly.
such a great idea, curious to see what it can do.
Thank you! it’s been exciting to see others find value in the idea too.
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I agree. I think we’re starting to see exactly that shift. Performance and model quality are improving everywhere, so privacy and ownership of data are becoming much more important differentiators.
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Sero uses Ollama, so you're not locked into a specific model. I've tested it with Llama and Qwen, but you can use whichever local model works best for your machine. It will auto detect, and you can use that.
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It handles scanned PDFs as well. I have added OCR as a fallback, so it should work fine.