What is AI Butler?

AI Butler is the open-source, self-hosted personal AI agent you own end-to-end. One Go binary. No dependencies. Runs offline. Remembers you across every conversation, every channel, every week. Works with Claude, GPT, Gemini, or your own local Ollama — zero cloud lock-in.

It’s a personal AI you run yourself: a real memory system, 12 messaging channels, and an agent that actually does things on your machine through a capability-gated tool registry.

What makes it different

Capability	What it means
Lives on your machine	Self-hosted, single Go binary, zero telemetry unless you opt in — runs from Raspberry Pi to cloud
Remembers you	FTS5 + knowledge graph + vector embeddings; your memory stays local, is yours, and is never LLM-summarized
Any model	Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, Groq, DeepSeek — bring your own key or run fully local
12 channels	web, terminal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, LINE, IRC, webhook, Nostr
Free, Apache 2.0	You pay your model provider directly, or run fully local for $0
Filesystem-aware	Reads your actual workspace via MCP
Capability-gated + audit-logged	Every tool call is visible and permissioned
Natural-language scheduling	”every weekday at 8am brief me” → cron

The short pitch

You install one binary. You open a web chat. You tell it who you are, what you’re working on, what you want it to remember. From that moment on:

• Every future conversation draws on that memory — on the web, in Telegram, on the terminal, wherever
• Every scheduled task you set up runs on its own and delivers to whichever channel you pick
• Every file, tool, and connected app is available through natural language — no APIs to learn
• Every dollar spent is tracked, capped, and visible in a live budget meter

Your data stays on your laptop. Your models stay in your control. Your agent stays yours.

Works everywhere you chat

12 channels wired up — web chat and the terminal REPL are ready today, the other 10 are in beta. Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, LINE, IRC, custom webhook, and Nostr, plus the built-in web chat and terminal REPL. Same agent, same memory, every platform. Start a conversation on your laptop, continue it from your phone on your commute, finish it from a terminal SSH session that evening — all one thread to the agent, all drawing on one memory store.

See Channels for the full list and setup.

Memory that actually works

This is a core strength of AI Butler. Three memory systems running in parallel, fused with Reciprocal Rank Fusion:

1. FTS5 full-text search — SQLite’s built-in BM25 keyword index over every message, note, and extracted fact
2. Knowledge graph — entities (people, projects, places, decisions) automatically extracted from conversation, stored relationally in SQLite, queryable with recursive CTEs
3. Vector embeddings — semantic similarity via Ollama’s nomic-embed-text (default, local) or any OpenAI-compatible embedding provider

Ask about something you mentioned weeks ago — it finds it, even if you don’t remember the exact words. See the Memory feature page for the architecture.

Security first

AI Butler is built with a security-first architecture. 59 internal security audit passes. RBAC with admin/user/viewer/agent roles. FIDO2/WebAuthn + OIDC SSO + TOTP. Capability-gated tools with tamper-evident audit trail. WASM plugin sandbox (Extism). SSRF protection. Shell command allowlisting. Zero CVEs (govulncheck verified).

Details: Security Model and Security Audit.

Your data, your machine

Self-hosted. Single Go binary. Runs on Raspberry Pi, laptop, VPS, or Kubernetes. Apache 2.0 licensed with explicit patent grant. Zero telemetry unless you opt in. Everything in a local SQLite file you can back up with cp.

Quick install (3 commands)

git clone https://github.com/LumabyteCo/aibutler.git
cd aibutler && CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o aibutler .
./aibutler vault set anthropic_api_key sk-ant-... && ./aibutler run

Open http://localhost:3377 — you’re chatting with your own personal AI in under a minute.

Using Ollama for fully-local? Skip the vault set line — AI Butler auto-detects Ollama on startup.

Next steps

• Quick Start with screenshots → — 5-minute walkthrough from git clone to your first real conversation, plus 5 live examples showing memory + scheduling + file exploration in action
• Choose your AI model → — compare Claude / GPT / Gemini / Ollama and their cost/quality tradeoffs
• Install — full install options (source, release binary, Docker, Kubernetes, systemd, Raspberry Pi)
• Integrate an MCP server → — extend AI Butler with any of the 58+ platforms in the MCP ecosystem
• FAQ → — the 25 most common questions about AI Butler