BOAR is an open-source Android app that keeps a small AI model and a library of knowledge on your phone. After one download at setup, it answers with no signal at all: in flight, underground, on a mountain, at sea. Every answer shows the articles it came from, and every answer is measured.
These docs cover using it, adding to it, and checking it.
- Install BOARGet the APK, check its checksum, and do the one-time setup download.
- See it workingFour short clips and screenshots from a real phone in airplane mode.
- Ask and checkHow BOAR answers, what the sources mean, and when to trust it.
- What stays on your phoneThe two times BOAR uses the internet, and everything it never sends.
What BOAR is
- An offline research companion. Ask it to explain, compare or work something out. It searches its library on the phone and a model on the phone writes the answer.
- A library you can check. The built-in library has about 5,300 short Wikipedia-derived articles, and an optional pack adds the introductions of Wikipedia's ~50,000 Vital Articles. Answers list the articles they used.
- Yours. MIT-licensed, no account, no API, no Google Play Services. Bring your own documents, your own model and your own packs.
- Measured. Every answer records the model, the time to the first word, the speed and the memory used. The results are published, failures included.
What it isn't
- Not a frontier model. The default model has 1.5 billion parameters. It's good at plain questions and slips on long syntheses; bigger models are slower. See Models.
- Not a doctor or a rescue service. It can tell you what hypothermia looks like. Get real help as soon as you can reach it.
- Not multilingual yet. The library and search are English. The app's menus are in English and Portuguese.
Where to go next
- New here: Install BOAR, then Ask and check.
- Want more knowledge on the phone: Knowledge packs and Your documents.
- Curious how it works: How it works and Results.
- Want to help: Contribute, or join the Discord.