Most tools that involve any kind of AI or speech processing work the same way: you send your data (a file, some audio, some text) to a server, something happens to it there, and a result comes back. Four tools on this site deliberately don't work that way — Speech to Text, Text to Speech, Image to Text (OCR), and Background Remover all process everything directly on your own device.
What "client-side" actually means here
Two different underlying technologies make this possible. The two voice tools use the Web Speech API — a capability built directly into some browsers, so recognition and speech synthesis happen as part of the browser itself, with no separate download beyond what's already installed on your device. The two image tools use WebAssembly (WASM) — a technology that lets a browser run genuinely demanding code, including real AI models, at near-native speed, directly on your device's own CPU (or GPU, where supported). Both approaches end at the same place: the actual processing — recognizing your speech, reading text out of an image, isolating a subject from its background — happens locally, not on a server.
Why this is a meaningfully different privacy model
With a typical cloud-based tool, your data is sent somewhere, even if that provider promises not to store it — you're trusting a policy, not a technical guarantee. With a client-side tool, there's nothing to trust in that sense: the image, audio, or text genuinely never leaves your device, because there's no server call in the processing path to begin with. That's a stronger, verifiable claim rather than a promised one — you can check it yourself in your browser's network tab and see no image or audio upload happening.
The trade-off, honestly
The two WASM-based tools (OCR and Background Remover) each require a one-time download of the AI model they use — a few megabytes for OCR, tens of megabytes for background removal — the first time you use them. That's the real cost of doing the work locally instead of on a server: the "smart" part has to actually live on your device temporarily. Your browser caches it afterward, so it's a one-time cost per device, not a repeated one.
Why we built it this way
This site's whole premise is free tools with no sign-up and no account — client-side processing extends that same idea to AI-powered tools specifically: no server cost to us, and no data custody question for you, since there's genuinely nothing to store or mishandle on our end for these four tools.