What it does
Elephas is a desktop app for Mac that answers questions from documents you add, such as PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, slide decks and scanned pages. It indexes them on your computer, searches for the relevant passages and writes an answer that cites the file and the page, slide or sheet it came from. You choose where answers are generated: the included Elephas AI through its gateway, your own API key with providers such as OpenAI, Claude or Gemini, or a model downloaded to run on your computer, in which case nothing is sent anywhere. Names, email addresses and phone numbers are hidden before a question leaves your computer, and you can see what was hidden. The page says this detection works best in English and is not a guarantee. Documents are grouped into Brains, and a Brain can be shared with a team using end-to-end encrypted sync, per-person roles and one AI policy for the team. The site says Elephas does not run agents, send emails, browse the web or automate apps. It runs on macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon, and a Windows version is described as coming soon.
Capabilities
- Answers that cite the file and the page, slide or sheet
- Documents and search index stay on your computer
- Personal details hidden before a question is sent
- Choice of Elephas AI, your own API key or an on-computer model
- Shared team Brains with end-to-end encrypted sync
- Accepts PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Markdown, EPUB, images of text and web pages
When to use it
- You handle confidential client files and do not want to paste them into a chatbot
- You need answers you can trace back to a quoted passage
- You want a shared private knowledge base for a small team
