Meet BotPsy, the pint-sized AI assistant that lives on your device and keeps your data private

Tether AI Research has launched BotPsy, a compact 0.8-billion-parameter language model specifically designed to operate locally on devices rather than in the cloud. Built on Qwen3.5-0.8B, this 'personal assistant' focuses on executing simple tasks like web searches, calendar management, and file handling through function calling and agentic workflows, aiming to provide privacy and reduce reliance on expensive cloud AI services.

For developers and users, BotPsy represents a shift toward specialized, efficient models that trade raw power for privacy and cost control. While it's not suited for high-stakes decisions and makes occasional errors, it delivers state-of-the-art tool-use performance for its size class, outperforming models up to 1.2B parameters in benchmarks. This release signals a growing trend toward on-device AI that gives users more control over their data and workflow customization.