TENKA
She drives.
No chat window pretending to help. TENKA is an open-source, local-first desktop AI companion. She reaches into your actual apps and websites, and tells you what she did.
Six senses, alive at once
Voice, vision, memory, browser, apps, and continuous learning. TENKA listens, thinks, remembers, and acts, all on your machine. No cloud. No account. No one watching but her.
Three stacks. The LLM is never asked which one to use.
A deterministic router sends each task to the cheapest stack that can do the job: Playwright for the browser, Terminator for native apps, and vision only when nothing else can see. About 80% of her actions use zero vision calls, which is what every other agent pays for on every action.
A personality that actually evolves
Six traits (warmth, curiosity, directness, playfulness, assertiveness, honesty), each bumped by events and decayed over time by a real engine running locally. The version of her you meet tomorrow won't be the version of her you meet today.
Everything she knows about you, on one SQLite file
A private knowledge graph she builds from your conversations, stored in %APPDATA%/tenka/ as one SQLite file plus a FAISS index. Scrub through time, resolve contradictions, and forget anything instantly. Nothing leaves your machine unless you point her at a cloud LLM yourself.
She plans, she fails, she recovers
TENKA writes a plan, runs it, and when a step fails she replans on the fly instead of giving up, caching the procedure so the next run is free.
About $2 / month for daily use
Most days you stay on free quotas. The only ongoing cost is the LLM provider you choose: Gemini Flash-Lite on the cloud default (~$2/mo), Groq + Cerebras free tiers as a $0 public fork, or Ollama fully offline for $0. There is always a $0 path. Compare that to $20/month for ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, or Cursor.
The honest answers
- Is this another cloud assistant?
- No. TENKA is a desktop agent that runs on your machine and acts on your real apps. The cloud is only an LLM provider you point her at, and you can run her fully offline.
- Does it work without internet?
- Yes, with Ollama locally. Quality drops vs Gemini, but every intent (voice, vision, memory, automation) still works.
- How is this different from a screen-recording AI agent?
- Most agents use vision on every action. TENKA's router deterministically picks between browser, native apps, and vision, preferring the cheap path. About 80% of her actions use zero vision calls.
- Can I add support for my favorite app?
- Yes. Either teach her once (she learns and caches the procedure) or drop a YAML manifest in personalities/apps/. No code changes, no fork required.
- Where does my data live?
- One SQLite file plus a FAISS index in %APPDATA%/tenka/. No telemetry SDK, no analytics. Nothing leaves your machine unless you choose a cloud LLM.
- What if she clicks the wrong thing?
- ESC-hold anywhere aborts immediately. She asks before destructive actions (delete, send, pay, post), and her cursor is visibly TENKA-colored when she's driving.
- What hardware do I actually need?
- Windows 10/11, about 2 GB RAM, any GPU (works on integrated, comfortable on a GTX 1650). Microphone optional for voice.
- What's the difference between TENKA and MateEngine?
- MateEngine is the Unity frontend: the visible desktop character. TENKA is the engine behind her: the brain, memory, and automation. They talk over a local socket, and TENKA can run headless.