Trace Chat

An assistant.
Without the cloud.

Every other assistant answers by sending what you typed to a company. Trace Chat answers from the chip in your phone, so the question never goes anywhere.

One email, when it is ready. No newsletter, and no App Store date promised.

No accountNothing to sign up for and no history stored anywhere but your phone.
No request leavesThe model runs on your iPhone. There is no API call, so there is nothing to log.
Works in aeroplane modeNot a degraded offline mode. It is the only mode there is.

What it is

The question never leaves.

Ask an assistant to reword an awkward email, or to help you think through something you have not told anyone, and that text goes to a company that keeps it. Trace Chat does the same work without the sending part. It is the same constraint as the other Trace apps, applied to the thing people hand over most carelessly.

In short: Trace Chat drafts, rewords, summarises, explains and talks things through, with no account, no server and no request leaving your iPhone.

How it works

Nothing leaves your phone.

Trace Chat has no backend. The model sits on the device and the answer is computed there, which is why there is nothing to log and nothing to leak.

1. The model lives on the phone

It downloads once and stays there. After that the app never needs a network, because there is no service to reach.

2. Your conversation stays put

Messages are written to your device and nowhere else. Nothing is uploaded for training, quality review or anything else.

3. Delete means delete

Clear a conversation and it is gone. There is no copy on a server, because a copy was never made.

Being straight with you

It will not beat a data centre.

A model that fits on a phone is smaller than one that fills a rack, and it shows: it knows less, and it will be wrong more often on anything obscure. Nothing about running locally changes that, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What it does instead is answer without a company in the middle. There is no release date and it is not on the App Store.

Questions

An assistant on your phone, answered.

What people ask before joining the waitlist.

What is Trace Chat?

Trace Chat is a chat assistant for iPhone that runs its language model on the device itself. You ask it things and it answers, with no account, no server and no request leaving your phone. Trace Chat is in development.

Is Trace Chat as good as ChatGPT?

No, and it is worth being plain about that. A model small enough to run on a phone is meaningfully less capable than one running in a data centre. Trace Chat is for the things a smaller model does well: drafting, rewording, summarising, explaining, thinking something through. What it offers instead of raw capability is that nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Does Trace Chat send my conversations anywhere?

No. The model runs on your iPhone, so there is no API request to send and no server to receive one. Your conversations are stored on the device and are not uploaded for training, quality review or any other purpose.

Does Trace Chat work offline?

Yes. Once the model has downloaded, Trace Chat needs no network at all and works fully in aeroplane mode, because inference happens on the chip in your iPhone rather than on a remote service.

Does Trace Chat need an account?

No. There is no account to create and no profile to delete, so there is no record of who asked what.

Is Trace Chat available to download?

Not yet. Trace Chat is in development and there is a waitlist at yourtraceapp.com/chat. The other Trace app, Trace Voice, is out now on the App Store.

One email,
when it is ready.

No newsletter, no countdown, no launch spam.