ollama VS SillyTavern

Download: Go to https://ollama.com/ and click on the download link for your operating system.

Most AI resume tools call out to OpenAI or Anthropic and charge you for every request. Persona supports Ollama — which means you can run the AI model locally on your own hardware, with zero API costs and zero data leaving your machine.

To solve these, we built a stack that prioritizes integrity over ease. The centerpiece is Ollama, running the mxbai-embed-large model locally. This is the engine that translates human thought into high-dimensional coordinates.

Ollama for model serving

Fully offline: Point it at Ollama or LM Studio. Zero cost, nothing leaves your network.

Recommended hardware: The RTX 3060 with 12 GB VRAM is the budget king here — all these models fit with room to spare for KV cache overhead, even Gemma 4:12B (which needs ~8.5–9 GB with overhead). An RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB gives you more headroom. On the Apple side, any M2 or M3 MacBook with 16 GB unified memory handles these models comfortably via Ollama's Metal backend.

This guide shows how to swap out every cloud API with a local Ollama server running qwen3-coder:30b. Same tools, same workflows, no data leaving your network.

Related: 35B MoE on 2× 1080 Ti · Ollama

The sample is a tiny console app running entirely against a local Ollama model — no cloud keys, and every HTTP call is traced so I can see exactly what goes over the wire (complete sample code). There's a single skill on disk:

irm https://ollama.com/install.ps1 | iex

SillyTavern - Character AI interface

With SillyTavern it’s pretty easy to create a connection to Featherless. Simply click on the plug icon at the top and make the following selections:

Right, but it's certainly easier for people who might not even know what "API" stands for, and that's quite nifty. As far as self-hosted frontends go, I can personally recommend SillyTavern[1] in the browser, ChatterUI[2] on mobile, and ShellGPT[3] for CLI. LobeChat looks pretty cool, though! I'll definitely check it out.

[1] https://github.com/SillyTavern/SillyTavern

[2] https://github.com/Vali-98/ChatterUI

[3] https://github.com/TheR1D/shell_gpt

I don't think there is any enumeration for {{char}} macros. Here is some good discussion on the subject.

As for SillyTavern, you need the main SillyTavern frontend and SillyTavern-extras (for TTS, STT, etc.) They're pretty easy to install. SillyTavern connects to oobabooga and SillyTavern-extras via API.

Finally, no matter what backend I use, I need it to be compatible with my power-user frontend, SillyTavern. That way I always use the same UI, with the characters I created and extensions I want, e. g. web search, XTTS text-to-speech and Whisper speech recognition for real-time voice chat - and all of that local!