Setting Up Your Local LLM
Alistair's writing assistance runs on a language model that lives entirely on your machine. Nothing you write is ever sent anywhere. This walks through picking a model that fits your hardware, speeding it up with your graphics card, and using it as a writing coach and to interview your characters.
Find ML / LLM in Settings
Open Settings and go to ML / LLM under ML & Voice. This panel is your control center: it shows your detected hardware, your active model, and a shortcut into the Setup Wizard whenever you want to add another.
Run the Setup Wizard
Click Download More Models to launch the Setup Wizard. It starts by scanning your own machine (processor, memory, and graphics card) and uses that to work out what size of model you can actually run well, instead of guessing.
Choose how to get a model
Continue to Model Selection. The quickest route is the Recommended model at the top, picked for your computer's memory: one click downloads it. Browse Hugging Face Models opens a curated, searchable library instead, and Import Local Model takes a .gguf file you already have, drag-and-drop. Downloads keep going if you close the window, and an interrupted one picks up where it stopped.
Pick a model sized to your hardware
The Model Browser opens with a handful of curated, writing-focused models up front, plus a search bar into thousands more GGUF models on Hugging Face, filtered to the size that suits your computer. Open a model to see its files, each labelled by what it trades off (Balanced, High quality, Best quality) with the memory it needs; the ones marked Recommended suit most computers.
Use your graphics card
A graphics card runs models several times faster than the processor. Open Settings > Downloads: Alistair detects your card and offers the right download. NVIDIA cards get the GPU package (it also speeds up Text to Speech); AMD Radeon and Intel graphics get the Vulkan engine, about 20 MB. Restart Alistair after it installs.
Ask your writing coach
Open the chat from the top-right corner. Ask about the craft, talk through your world, or turn on Practice for a short exercise; paste what you write and it gives you feedback. Questions asks you pointed questions so you decide for yourself, and Reference cites your manuscript. When you want a draft, ask for one: Draft returns paste-ready prose and Dialogue returns spoken lines only. In Settings > Downloads, Keep model loaded sets how long the model stays in memory between uses.
Interview your characters
In the Characters panel, click Interview on a character's card. They answer in their own voice from what you've written: their sheet, relationships, the lore they're part of, and the scenes they appear in (the passages used are shown under each answer). Pick a Focus (their past, how they talk, a relationship, a scene, or rehearsing a conversation where you play the other character) and the suggested questions follow it. Save to Notes keeps the interview, and the character stays consistent with it next time.
