Local-first AI reading

A little more light for every paper.

Gloss is a private, self-hosted companion for reading research papers deeply—without sending your library somewhere else.

Get Gloss ↓ Explore the reader →
100%your machine
PDF + TeXone workspace
7 themesmade for reading
insight
✦
AI summary ↗
highlighted

The paper reader, re-lit

Your reading desk
should think with you.

Gloss puts a real PDF reader, your annotations, and a capable AI collaborator in the same calm space. Ask a question, inspect a claim, trace a reference, then keep going.

attention_is_all_you_need.pdf
⌘ K
Gloss showing a paper reader and structured AI summary

See the signal

From first page
to real understanding.

Turn a dense paper into an explorable working surface. Get a structured brief, inspect highlighted passages, and follow your own thread of thought.

  • 01
    Paper-aware chatAsk against the whole paper with local retrieval.
  • 02
    Notes that stay yoursCapture your thinking and export clean Markdown.
  • 03
    Tools in the marginExplain, translate, highlight, and annotate in place.

A better way through

Every paper, more navigable.

Built around the moments where a research paper asks the most of you.

✦

Find the thread

Structured summaries turn first contact into orientation: question, method, result, contribution, limitation.

PaperMethodResults
↯

Ask precisely

Select anything—from a result to an equation—and get a focused explanation in context.

“The proposed architecture...”
⌁

Follow the graph

Trace citations outward and discover related work through Crossref, arXiv, and Semantic Scholar.

Attention is all you need 2017Language models are few-shot 2020
✎

Leave a mark

Highlights, pencil, freehand lasso, and notes stay saved locally beside the paper.

Why does this scale?

Make it yours

One reader.
Many ways in.

Plug in the tools your research practice calls for. Discover reader panels and skills without leaving your library.

Discover extensionsBring new ways of thinking to your reader.
⌘

Paper Chat

Keep a durable conversation with every paper.

Installed
⌘

Visual Mind Map

Turn structure into an explorable map.

✧

Deep Translate

Sentence-level translation that remembers.

⌁

Scholar

Find the next paper worth opening.

Installed

Your work stays close

Research is personal.
Your workspace should be too.

Local by default Your papers, notes, and generated work live on your machine.

Bring your model Use local Claude or Codex, APIs, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Keep your flow Windows desktop app, browser app, or CLI—pick the surface that fits.

Start reading differently

Make room for
better questions.

Gloss is free, local, and ready for your next paper.

⊞
Windows desktopDownload Windows x64 .exe ↓
Recommended ◌
Linux / macOSRun locally with npm / Bun →
 ▰
npm / Bunnpx gloss-local@latest →

Open source · Node 18+ · Python 3.11+ for the web app