What is pocketpal-ai-net?

PocketPalNet is a mobile app for running AI chat models directly on your phone, so conversations stay private and work offline. It is a fork of an existing app called PocketPal AI, and it keeps every feature of the original, including offline chat, managing downloadable model files, custom AI personas called Pals, and small built-in talents like math or date lookups. The one new feature this fork adds is internet search. If you load a model that supports calling external tools, you can let it search the web when it needs current information, while the rest of the conversation still happens fully on your device. You control where those searches are sent: you can run your own free, self-hosted search service called SearXNG, or connect to one of several paid or free-tier search APIs such as Brave Search, Serper, Exa, Tavily, or Google Custom Search, each with its own signup and free-usage limits described in the README. The project is also testing two features that are not fully finished yet. One saves a snapshot of a conversation's memory so reopening an old chat loads faster instead of re-reading the whole history. The other lets you paste your own notes or documents into the app and later ask the model questions about them, similar to searching the web but over your own saved text. The README includes a full walkthrough for setting up a personal SearXNG search server directly on an Android phone using an app called Termux, with no computer or Docker required, plus the exact settings needed to connect it to PocketPalNet.