A Canadian developer has released Bob, a portable AI assistant that boots entirely from a USB stick. No installation, no cloud connection - plug in the drive and you have an assistant with voice control, image recognition, and 38 built-in tools running locally on whatever machine you're using.
The privacy angle is the main pitch. When Bob processes your queries, nothing goes to external servers. For people working with sensitive documents - legal, medical, financial - or anyone who prefers their AI activity stays on their own hardware, that's a meaningful distinction from ChatGPT or Claude.
The 38 tools cover a range of productivity tasks, though the site is sparse on specifics about which AI model powers the system and what hardware requirements look like. Local AI models (ones that run on your own device rather than on remote servers) typically need at least 8-16GB of RAM and a reasonably modern processor to perform well. How Bob handles that constraint matters a lot for whether it's genuinely usable or just technically interesting.
Early-stage projects like this usually come with rough edges - incomplete documentation, limited support, features that don't quite work as advertised. Bob is currently in early access. The concept is solid and there's real demand for offline AI tools, but the gap between "interesting project" and "reliable daily driver" tends to be wide at this stage.