What you need to know
Local document AI keeps file extraction, retrieval, and answer generation on hardware you control when every required component runs on the device. Save the complete file locally, prepare any OCR support, activate a compatible model, and verify the workflow without connectivity. Always inspect cited passages because local models and extraction tools can misread complex files.
A document answer has several local stages
The model does not usually read an entire large file on every question. A document pipeline first extracts text, divides it into searchable passages, retrieves passages related to the question, and places a selected set into the model prompt. Keeping generation local is not enough if extraction, OCR, embedding, or retrieval sends the file to another service.
Text-based PDFs are easier to process than scans. A scanned page may need optical character recognition, while tables, columns, footnotes, diagrams, and unusual reading order can produce incomplete text. Check the extracted content before treating an answer as authoritative, especially for legal, medical, financial, or safety-critical material.
Use citations as an inspection tool
A citation should lead back to the passage used for an answer. It helps you distinguish a statement grounded in the file from an unsupported model completion. Confirm that the cited text actually supports the claim, that page or section references are plausible, and that important qualifiers have not been dropped.
For an offline privacy check, import a non-sensitive representative file, disable connectivity, ask a new question, and open the cited source passage. Also review where the app stores imported copies, indexes, chat history, and temporary files. A local workflow still needs clear deletion and backup behaviour if the documents are confidential.